Every interaction I have with AI where I previously would’ve interacted with a person is worse. Whether that’s something mundane like scheduling an appointment, use at a doctor’s office, chat support. I imagine it’s cheaper for the company deploying it, but it’s all bad. It lines up with companies being more concerned with investors than actual users and customers though.
US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI
141–150 of 303 posts
Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI
#142This is intentional. Companies are actively trying to develop capabilities to replace humans. I am surprised there are not enough protests against this.
why should I protest not needing to work for money? Isn't post scarcity a great goal to have?
These companies are going to destroy jobs and do nothing to help the people displaced by said destruction.
Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI
#143There’s very little evidence of AI replacing jobs en mass. There a ton of evidence that underperforming companies are trimming fat, with CEOs citing AI impacts rather than their own bad decisions that led to the fat that needed trimming.
Underperforming? Big tech companies are reporting record profits and major layoffs in the same press releases.
Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
2% is not the opposite of suffering. It's suffering-adjacent. It loses ground to China.
Real GDP growth in Q4 was 0.5%, so it’s a heck of a lot better than that. 2% is average for past decade+.
Sure but China had double digit numbers for decades. 2% doesn't cut it unless you want your grandkids speaking Mandarin.
Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI
#145If its because of AI we should see a similar trend across other developed countries, no? And maybe even a correlation with how much they adopt AI https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ai-adoption-rates-by-countr...
Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI
#146There’s very little evidence of AI replacing jobs en mass. There a ton of evidence that underperforming companies are trimming fat, with CEOs citing AI impacts rather than their own bad decisions that led to the fat that needed trimming.
Underperforming? Big tech companies are reporting record profits and major layoffs in the same press releases.
Relative to the number of people they employ, yes they were underperforming. Most did rampant over-hiring during the pandemic and are simply correcting for that now.
Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI
#147The reality no one ever wants to talk about is that big tech doesn't need as many employees that it has. Anyone who has worked in big tech knows it is true.
Okay but - if an industry can afford more employees than it has is there a real reason not to have them? Aside from shareholder greed etc.
Tech as a whole may not have too many employees, it's just Big Tech that has too many. If those employees were distributed among many more smaller companies the tech market as a whole would be much more competitive.
Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI
#148The reality no one ever wants to talk about is that big tech doesn't need as many employees that it has. Anyone who has worked in big tech knows it is true.
For a long time this was compounded by a "better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in" strategy, where you hired people to deny them to your competition and then invented things for them to do. If it turns out whole segments are in fact pointless then the endgame could be truly nuts.
Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment is completely divorced from the facts given in the article. The main point is that certain types of jobs like customer service reps, secretaries and sales people are being disproportionately affected. If it was just general fears about the economy overall one would expect a more broad-based impact.
If you replace customer service with LLMs I will look for a way to stop doing business with you.
The number of businesses you can switch to is quickly diminishing.
Re: US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
This matches my experience at MSFT. Very little work for too many people, MSFT CFO also said in the latest earnings calls that MSFT will have fewer people next year than this year, they offered buyouts to tenured people, did layoffs in LinkedIn not sure if there’s more to come.
Think this is the FAANGs entering their stodgy middle life phase like Oracle et al did decades ago. Except for Google they haven't done anything innovative in like a decade. It's time to wring money out of the monopoly and buy companies to add to that.
This is the take nobody is ready for!
Everyone is under the illusion that growth is infinite and there are no periods where things jam to a halt and we get stagnation.