Wow you don’t say. It’s almost like jumping to firing the intelligent people who keep your business afloat at the mere idea that you could stuff a few more unnecessary dollars into your pocket without verifying the function of the “replacement” technology wasn’t the best idea was it? Personally I’m not even mad about the money. I’m pissed at the tech industry’s nonstop effort of attempting to discredit our work. I truly get why scientists get fed up and leave the country.
Get fucked, continuously.
While very different in some ways, some parallels between the AI-driven layoffs and the offshore outsourcing layoffs of the mid-2000s are striking.
Ultimately both scenarios were/are driven by corporate greed. And it looks like the AI one is backfiring for many of the same reasons as the offshore one.
They are replacing experienced staff who have strong critical thinking abilities and hands-on knowledge, and the replacements lack the institutional knowledge and the ability to look at the big picture, and they substitute speed for methodological discernment.
Time is cyclical.
If your company uses AI (in the colloquial LLM sense), it deserves to go bankrupt.
No ifs, ands, or buts.
Period.
If it uses it as a core pillar of their business, the owners deserve to empty their entire life earnings to the employees in perpetuity and they shouldn’t ever own anything better than a cardboard box home.
We need to make using this absolutely painful for owners.
For people like Altman, it should be death row worthy.
I hate the notion of “laying off people to generate returns” so fucking much.
Shocker. Just another excuse to fire higher paid workers, point at a line going up (until it doesn’t), say AI a lot, and then hire lower paid workers for the same (or worse now fighting AI in some cases) job.
This is the real answer. AI is just an excuse to cut costs while the economy is going to shit. By claiming it is all about AI, they get to cut and slash all they want without signaling to the stock market and their competitors that things are going to shit. It also allows them to cut without blaming the economy because pointing out the failing economy would upset the man-baby that is fucking up the entire world economy.
No higher ROI AND they now have a mission critical dependency on a powerful third party (rather than on the far more fragmented and generally weaker counterparties which are employees).
Even on pure business terms and not even considering the longer term accumulation of problems and hence fall in returns over time due to second order problems of using AI in certain areas (i.e. the consequences of the much higher high-severity-error rates of AI compared to even barelly trained humans or the inability of AI to learn and improve) it’s a seriously incompetent choice.
I mean, you can excuse a Manager for not understanding the higher level structural problems of AI given how much the messaging around it for non-techies so far has just swamped people with “butterflies and rainbows” views on AI, but considering the risks of dependencies on third parties is a central skill for any decent Upper level manager as is looking at what an investment is returning and pivoting when it’s not delivering.
Maybe we shoild all rush into doing things we dont undrrstand
Like, no shit the plagiarism machine that cannot create anything truly novel and can only regurgitate other people’s already existing work can’t replace professionals. I legitimately hope all of these companies go under.
Oh, and now you need a new fucking degree to learn how to ‘optimize your token usage with well crafted prompts the machine can understand’ otherwise you’ll burn through the energy Cleveland uses in a year, and end up costing the company millions.
Dumbest fucking bubble so far other than tulips and beanie babies
Oh, and now you need a new fucking degree to learn how to ‘optimize your token usage
In some companies, ‘optimize your token usage’ means using as many tokens as possible.
Indeed.
“AI is good” became “Good employees use AI” became “The more AI the better” became “The more tokens used the better the employee.”
What’s incredible is that none of these are self-evidently true premises, but rich C-suite aliens managed to buy into the entire illogical chain.
but rich C-suite aliens managed to buy into the entire illogical chain.
When many decision-makers are incentivized to only care about their next quarterly bonus or stock grant, just like the subprime crisis, people will absolutely set their company up to fail regardless of the consequences. Companies have trained people they are disposable so why would they act in the long term interest of the company? Economics, that is, incentives, are undefeated in making people do things. It may not be what someone intends, but being naive about economics is why adults are needed in designing reward systems (from government policy to company programs).
No it’s dumber. Beanie babies at least left you with a little doll kids could enjoy.
Two things…
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Is…is Cleveland known for high energy usage? I don’t get the reference.
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Tulips had a bubble? I’m so confused.
Ah, it happened in 1634. That’s why I hadn’t heard of this. I wasn’t born yet for a few more years.
Damn whipper snappers
I think he just picked a decently big town as an example, and Dutch tulips were the very first stock craze.
The area is known for causing the 2003 blackout, but that was really due to the heat that day.
Oh man! The 2003 blackout was AWESOME!!! I’m from Cleveland, and I thought I caused it. Local time power went out at 3:45pm exactly. I know that because in those days I worked at a regional grocery store, and we used physical plastic time cards that you swipe, and then it beeps and you click the button that says “In” to clock in after it beeps.
Well, I start my shift at 4pm, and I was allowed to clock in 15 minutes early, but not 16 minutes early.
So at 3:44 I’m waiting. And waiting. And then 3:45. Swiiiipe! power dies
What’d I do? Oh fuck…what did I do? It didn’t even beep. I swiped my card, and then everything went black…
These were the days when your phone didn’t have a flashlight, but the nokia phones of those days were bright enough you could kinda use the screen itself as a source of light.
So once I made my way out of the office, I realized the whole BUILDING had no power. Now I was less sure I caused it. I thought one breaker had somehow gotten tripped, but that would just be a small portion of the building.
Then a coworker came running in, and said the whole block was out. So now I knew I had nothing to do with it. We turned on the radio, as we waited to figure out what to do. The music got interupted a half hour later saying the whole city was out. Within another hour we found out it was half the country.
So we got sent home before it turned dark. And thats when the day got fun. We sat on the sidewalk with lanterns and candles at our apartment building. We then watched in pitch black as a single headlight came flying around the corner real fast. A motorcycle that was then followed by about 3 cop cars chasing him. We’re all drunk on the sidewalk, sitting on folding chairs. We see the motorcycle go flipping and there is no way for me to describe the weird light show we saw. It lasted forever, and also onlu about 2 seconds. We had no idea what it was.
Turns out the motorcycle hit a curb at 70mph in the dark, went airborn and was flipping through the air, before crashing through the window of a house.
It took police 90 minutes to find the rider. Because they thought he ran on foot. Turns out he hit the wall above the window, died on impact, and his body fell to the ground behind a bush.
But we were all laughing not knowing he was dead. We were just imagining being inside that house, in candle light, before randomly a motorcycle crashes into your front window.
We just thought he did a magic trick, and vanished. Suddenly cops were descending on our block, with ambulances, and for some reason a fire truck. So we took that as our cue to go inside and smoke weed, and have sex all night.
Next day is when we found out what we saw. We didn’t know he had died. We eventually had figured out the light show was the motorcycle flipping end over end.
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And that all the vibecoding they do instead will eventually turn their whole product into an unmanageable mess which cannot be salvaged.
Thing is, they CAN replace “professionals” — which is 80% of the population. They won’t replace the original thinkers, of which there are relatively few.
And most original thinkers aren’t feeling threatened by AI, as they can figure out something new to do.
I mean, I remember college. I remember how many people graduated without an original thought in their heads, focused only on getting the credentials to land their dream job. Those are the people generative AI is coming for.
Has it made life more difficult? Yes. Is it a magic wand that will make companies rich without human investment? Absolutely not. At the end of the day, it’s just making the baseline of human knowledge accessible to the highest bidders, with a bit of randomness and sycophancy thrown in. Which is a step up from confident BS with a bit of randomness and sycophancy thrown in.
If you lay off all the humans so AI can be cheap labour for corporations then there are only three alternatives.
- provide humans with a universal basic income and living wage.
- kill them all.
- let them loose and let them wander (more addicitons, more theft, more homelessness, more violence).
Or you can start a land war in asia. Talked to a 44 year old on the train who’s basically living at a shelter. He would join the army if they would take him…
you also end up with AI buying AI from AI as there are no humans to generate or recieve the AI output.
🤔🧐😈
I feel like a variation of this exact article gets posted here every single day for the past year or so, and every time the same comments show up underneath. Nobody ever opens one of these threads and discovers a surprising or novel point of view.
I don’t understand why people spend their whole day talking about something they don’t like. It’s so bizarre to me.
I don’t understand why people spend their whole day talking about something they don’t like.
If people left me alone about it then I wouldn’t talk about it…reality is closer to this.
Where do they not leave you alone about it? 95% of AI related content I encounter online is people complaining about it on Lemmy.
Do you use Google search? That’s just one quick example I can think of off the top of my head.
Edit: In case it’s not clear enough, I was talking about Google shoehorning AI into the search bar and results.
Work? It sounds like thousands of idiot ceos are buying into the fake hype over this shit and forcing it on their employees. Before firing them. And then there’s the AI slop articles and imagery that’s cropping up everywhere…
Well it’s not just that people don’t like it, there are a lot of people whose jobs are on the line because of it.
So I guess it’s kind of hard for them not to keep talking about the thing that’s threatening their livelihood, which makes sense.
And of course they want to see news that tells them it isn’t going to be so bad and that their expertise will still be in demand.
I disagree - people’s jobs are not on the line because of AI. They are on the line because of the economy and AI is the excuse/fad of the year so AI is what is blamed. However I maintain it is the economy not AI at fault.
