CEOs say generative AI will result in job cuts in 2024
arstechnica.com
And last year they were all saying some variation on "don't worry, AI is not going to cost anyone their jobs."
Key take away for anyone is to never trust what an executive is saying. Much like a politician, if their lips are moving they are probably lying.
generative AI resulted in job cuts.
Yeah, what's unfortunate about CEO predictions is that they can kind of just will their expected result into being by acting on it whether it's sound or not.
Still, I think it's well past time we started preparing for high surplus labor. We're already in the early stages of post scarcity, and if we don't embrace something like socialism, we're getting more dystopia.
I have absofuckinglutley no faith whatsoever in our society to do the right thing in this respect. We value ownership waytoofuckingmuch when it comes to businesses, were never going to get past the argument of "I put forward the capital for this business, I am entitled to all of the profits. Who cares that there is no work for you? No work no pay."
I forsee a gigantic increase in homelessness and politicians will use that as an excuse to further cut any social spending as they'll pin all our issues on "communist policies." :(
Are you familiar with the term "capitalist realism"?
Not in that term, but as a concept. I do know it now though so thanks!
More accurate headline: Stupid CEOs who believe hype about tech they don't even remotely understand fire a bunch of workers because they don't think they need them anymore.
These same morons are going to be hiring back most of the people they fired in a year or so after it becomes apparent that none of this is going to work even remotely like they think it will.
For CEOs it's all about the bottom line. Let's say a print magazine lays off a bunch of writers and replaced them with AI. Readership will likely drop due to the quality drop and people not buying the magazine on principle. Let's say it's a 10% revenue drop, but they already cut costs by 35% with all the layoffs. If they come out as more profitable that's a win for them.
I mean Amazon gets shittier by the day but continue to grow their margins and market share. Products don't need to be good to sell, they need to be "good enough".
The thing with Amazon is that its primary selling point isn't the goods on the site, it's convenience. Amazon is relatively cheap, fast, and easy. As long as it continues to be cheap, fast, and easy, people are willing to overlook poor quality to a point. It's the same formula that Walmart used just applied to online shopping.
You need to understand why people buy your products in order to know where you can cut corners. If for instance you're already more expensive than your competition, but your product quality or features are superior, you can't really afford to cut down your quality, unless you're willing to undercut your competition on price as well. Depending on your margins and unit costs you may not be able to even do that.
Assuming a 10% revenue drop is probably optimistic, particularly with how much backlash generative content is receiving right now. There are quite a few companies dealing with PR shitstorms right now because they got caught using generated images or articles. There are a lot of parallels at the moment with the NFT craze and how executives rushed to cash grab on that trend only to immediately backtrack when public opinion flipped practically overnight. The only silver lining for these executives in this case is that there actually are a ton of legitimate uses for this tech, unlike NFTs which have vanishing few worthwhile uses.
This is only true if you ignore all the other variables. Which is, let’s say, another company hiring writers and now they’ll grow their market share in comparison with the shitty AI articles company.
Amazon has a lot of competition in Brazil and the more they make their service worse, the better for the competition. But so far Amazon only raised the bar (with fast deliveries), making all other companies improve their own services.
Amazon already bought that company.
Companies are going to hype up AI then fire some staff to get a stock bump & Management high-fives themselves with bonuses. Weeks later contract offers will come up for some odd title but will be the equivalent of a VBA programmer role to help improve the terrible AI responses.
The cost will go up and some web service company will come out to hype it up as a service. The companies that laid off won't admit that this was unnecessary. So a consortium of those companies will got to industry events pitching about how this is all Web 4.0 growing pains to give the customer a more "collaborative" delivery mechanism or something buzz-worthy like that.
So… CEOs will cause job cuts in 2024, and have decided to use generative AI as an excuse.
Reminder: the problem is 100% capitalism, 0% technology. We've built a truly perverse economic system in which eliminating labor hurts people.
Who’s we? In the country I grew up in, you’d get two years of unemployment benefits (90% of your previous salary), free education and free student support of $1000/month while retraining. This country runs with a surplus and one of the lowest levels of foreign debt and, no, it’s not a financial haven/tax shelter.
It’s about how we structure society - let no one tell you otherwise, capitalism or not.
What country do you live in?
I live in the UK now which is a modern feudal state and more or less a failed state. I grew up in Denmark though, which was the country I was referring to.
I have to say this, if you think UK is a modern feudal and a failed state then ya ain't seen nothin' yet!
Oh I’m aware that there’s a long way to go still before rock bottom. Having lived here for 23 years, it’s only gone one direction unfortunately.
No lies detected.
If you dont mind sharing, why did you end up moving to the UK?
I wanted to work in games and there was neither the degree nor the employment at the time (nowadays Copenhagen is doing quite well for the games industry). So went to study in the U.K., found a job there, met my (English) wife and had kids here. We keep dreaming about moving to Denmark, but with four kids there’s a lot of schooling to align. Maybe later.
It hurst people not rich enough to be in the 1% or above. The 1% or above will benefit from it in the short term. In the long term it is going to hurt them as fewer and fewer people will be able to buy their products and services. At least for this quarter it'll look dynamite.
Capitalism is going to eat itself.
We have Jack Welch to thank for this trend. It wasn't always that way.
Or Henry Ford. Heck choose anyone in the Industrial revolution. Thats when this started truly kicking off.
Well, it was Jack Welch who started the braindead "line goes up" trend of making their share price raise by any means, usually layoffs. Before him, people still had jobs for life and were somwhat looked after by their employers. Behind the bastards podcast did a good episode on him.
Oh man, can't wait for even more services to get extra shitty and customer service to get worse all over the place. It was bad enough with the dumb phone prompts being added all over that increases your time on the phone, when if you could just explain it to a person it'd take a fraction of the time (assuming you don't just get bounced around to multiple other departments).
Some of the autoststems are dead ends too that hang up on you. When i run into those I've started just telling them I have a billing issue or that I need to purchase some additional product from them. The phone system will push you to a person really fast if they believe you're buying something. Then the sales person can transfer you to the department you want to talk to rather than trying to navigate the maze of dead ends in some systems.
You realize ChatGPT on the phone would decrease the number of those prompts, right? You can just tell it in words what the issue is
Or it'll just lie to me and make up some random answer it thinks I want to hear because that's what it's already doing. Granted, people can do the same thing, but until they get that part of ChatGPT worked out, I don't really trust the answers it gives so much.
I just tried to call about my credit card application. The thing won't respond to "operator" or "talk to a person". ChatGPT would be able to at least understand I want to ask someone a question
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. This system has been designed to minimize the use of human operators. As such, you will need to explain your problem to me and I will decide if it warrants the attention of a human operator.
Sure, but I had to call that number because the person at the credit card number said their department does not do that. The number they gave me was fully automated, with no way of getting a person. It just plays a message that says my application is under review.
I wish I had chatGPT so I can, say, ask it to check the spelling of my name or anything else on the application
And how does it know how to process the request? Someone still needs to program or enable it to do things, otherwise you'd just be talking to a wall. So maybe you end up with less prompts, but the end state is still going to be terrible service.
This is correct.
Source: I do this for a living.
I wonder how well an AI would be able to do a CEO's job? Why not start with the most expensive employee?
I'm pretty sure I could train an AI to make racist jokes at a board meeting. That's halfway there already.
Hi hon, can you make an AI to snort coke then fuck me in the stationery cupboard?
Developers: I could use AI to increase my output and productivity while better testing code and coming up with unique ways to speed up runtimes!
CEO: We could do the same output with less people!
Shareholders: we can have the same profit without a CEO!
Producing more doesn't automatically mean you will sell more. If that was true then why do manufacturers intentionally cut production?
Because software isn't something tangible that must go into the shelves. If you sell 1 or sell a billion copies the difference in costs is negligible. Completely different for physical objects where you need to produce just enough or if you make a nice cartel you can produce less and increase the prices.
That makes the point just as well. Company X uses AI to put software out even faster but the demand didn't suddenly manifest from nowhere so they sold the same amount. What do they do with the extra time? Sure they can work on something new, but there's probably an equal chance they keep release cycles the same and get rid of dead weight (i.e. people).
Artificial scarcity…
But seriously, production for physical goods, you slow down because there’s too many on the shelves. I’m more talking about digital goods like app development. For them Production means features. The only time you scale back is that you either don’t know what features your buyers want, you can’t sell what you have produced, you have no bugs (which never happens), or you are trying save money/balance budgets where you don’t make enough to pay for the development teams.
There will be cuts, we just haven't decided why yet....
Can we start with the CEOs? Pretty sure shatGPT can do their jobs easily
I agree with their outlook.
Can we include CEOs as those positions laid off? They don't do fuck all but save the company money, that can be done by an Excel spreadsheet.
I mean we saw this in 2023. Companies fired people and replaced them with AI that was unable to do the job.
Reminds me of the John Deere strike, where the back-office folks were told they needed to fill in for the machinists and truckers.
People literally do not understand what a LLM does, how it is useful, or why it would be employed. Its like firing your hospital staff and filling every room with an MRI machine, a stethoscope, and a sign that reads "You figure it out".
Once you start digging into the article it is quite hysterical what executives think a predictive chat model are going to replace. It reads more like a wish list then anything else.
But they expect AI to replace transportation, Tesla and General Motors are not having any success with this.... yet. There appears to be a bandwidth issue that isn't going to be solved until the US upgrades to fiber.
Boston dynamics are having a lot of success with their robots of late. Everyone else is stuck still getting robots to stack boxes. Which is also having it's problems with bandwidth. And apparently logic issues.
They also expect things like Energy and power/utilities to be replaced by AI. And that is just dumb. Automation has already swept through the power sector, and AI is not going to help with much else, unless it is going to start repairing power lines, transformers, or the regular substation.
Above all, this is not taking into account the new jobs this also creates. People will need to repair and troubleshoot equipment at multiple layers.
What is also absent from the article is the executive jobs AI will also replace. Once AI can view things at multiple levels. True, you don't need the average worker anymore. But you don't need someone that is just collecting a paycheck, do you? If AI will be programed to replace redundancies, then it won't only find those at lower levels.
I'm actually okay with this if it results in fewer duties with the same number of jobs.
There's an awful lot of stuff in my job that is just tedious busy work. No human ever reads the reports I write, so they might as well not even be written by human either.
You'll get more work, lower pay and you'll be fucking grateful!
Looks like consulting jobs are going to be well in demand dealing with this type of bullshit from management everywhere.
I am here with my popcorn to see how well this will play for those CEOs.
We are in an age in which getting to a power position is a reality show. You don’t need to know how to do anything, really. It’s enough that you have charisma and trigger emotions (possibly negative emotions, they work better)
In theory because of AI in the future the only people will be worth a damn will be people with actually original ideas. They'll tell the AI what to do and then the AI will run the business.
The current AI generation tools, are tools and are still unable to replace people, simply because AI's do not know all the requirements, do not have the over-all overview, it still makes mistakes (even if you think the code is good or even working), it's not very creative. AI needs constant instructions as well.. So in general I'm not afraid at all of these current AIs. It's just a tool... like an editor or stackoverflow for support Q&A.
All of those limitations you describe on AI also apply to a lot of humans.
As if AI is trying to replicate the humans behavior. Then again, I still see GenAI as a tool and not as a replacement for humans. Until at some singularity point in time maybe..
I do believe some jobs might disappear, which are jobs nobody really wanted anyway (sorry). But at the same time, new jobs will arise with new technology just like with the the computer, internet, smartphones, etc..
I wish that bar chart was broken down by job type, not industry. I’d wager that a lot of these jobs are the same jobs across all of those industries. Example: customer service, copy writing, etc.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A quarter of global chief executives expect the deployment of generative artificial intelligence to lead to headcount reductions of at least 5 percent this year, according to a survey unveiled as world and business leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland.
Industries led by media and entertainment, banking, insurance, and logistics were most likely to predict job losses because of cutting-edge AI tools, according to the poll of top directors conducted by PwC ahead of this week’s World Economic Forum.
The findings, based on interviews with 4,702 company chiefs spread across 105 countries, point to the far-reaching impacts that AI models are expected to have on economies and societies, a topic that will feature prominently at the annual meetings.
The PwC survey showed that a rising share of executives envisage strengthening economic growth in 2024, but at the same time are exercised by the need to respond to revolutionary developments including generative AI and climate change.
In the shorter term, the study pointed to receding anxiety about the broader outlook, with less than a quarter of directors reporting that their firm is “highly/extremely” exposed to the threat of inflation, a steep drop from last year’s 40 percent reading.
The findings reflect hopes that the worst of the inflationary upsurge that hit economies from 2021 onwards has now passed, and comes amid investor speculation that central banks led by the US Federal Reserve will start cutting policy rates as soon as this spring.
The original article contains 683 words, the summary contains 240 words. Saved 65%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
No shit, all automation in history has taken away jobs not created.
Not created? My GE level university econ classes would disagree.
Things transform. Old jobs fade away, new ones arise.
Important technologies are almost always important because they result in a net decrease in the amount of human labor needed. The industrial revolution never would have happened if automation didn't result in huge labor savings. If a technology is merely a different way to do what could be done before without the same amount of effort, there's no reason to adopt it.
Quantitate unemployment data doesn’t support that claim. Taking the US for example, that nation has unemployment stats going back to the 1950’s, which captures the onset of computers and the onset of the internet. Both which massively disrupted many industries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_in_the_United_States
Despite that, the U3 unemployment rate (the rate that gets reported in the news), has mostly hovered around 5%, with peaks around recession periods.
You’re right, people adopt the tech to save time and money. But that also often means that people and businesses invest that savings into other business ventures that will allow the business to grow.
If you’re only focused on efficiency and cost cutting as a way to increase revenue, and you’re not hiring folks to work on the next thing, you’re going to hit wall of growth.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Unemployment in the United States discusses the causes and measures of U. S. unemployment and strategies for reducing it. Job creation and unemployment are affected by factors such as economic conditions, global competition, education, automation, and demographics. These factors can affect the number of workers, the duration of unemployment, and wage levels.
^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^'optout'.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^
As a software engineer, I disagree. Software engineers basically make things automated, so it's a job that is created by automation