CEOs Are Publicly Boasting About Reducing Their Workforces With AI
https://futurism.com/ceos-boasting-reducing-workforces-ai
CEOs Are Publicly Boasting About Reducing Their Workforces With AI
https://futurism.com/ceos-boasting-reducing-workforces-ai
23 Comments
Don’t need expensive management if you don’t have anyone to manage.
Submission statement: how do you think AI is going to affect unemployment rates?
Previously when automation took jobs, people would move over to jobs that the machines couldn’t do.
What will happen when the machines can do *all* jobs better and/or cheaper than humans?
Or is there something magical and special about humans that could never be done by a machine? (And if so, is that special magical thing enough in demand that it could employ all humans?)
Yes, yes. Keep boasting. You will regret this one day
at this point, (in some way shape or form) tar and feather needs to make its way into the modern era.
AI has been invested in and highly weaponized by those above, against those below, and society as a whole has been left all the poorer.
People need to remember that these leaderships need to be ousted, trying to use economic downturn to justify their sacrificing of people in their lower ranks.
when does it end?
Hyping up share price off the back of peak AI hype.
I’ll be worried when they stop talking about it because that will mean it’s actually impacting roles.
Companies are using AI to reduce their workforce, so their expenses are lower, which would equal to more profit, except it doesn’t because their board of directors will take any profit the CEO manages to squeeze out of the company and keep it for themselves. Eventually, there will be no one to blame when people stop buying their products or services cause AI doesn’t need food, water, shelter or games. A power supply and internet access is all they really need and so long as CEOs think AI is something that will save them millions, they will gladly give AI what it needs without a second thought.
I’m curious to know their response to the fact that they’re removing consumers out the economy which will eventually impact their customer base before you know it.
I really do hope people soon realise that all the benefits that corporations give us are just unintended side effects of their true purpose which is to just create money for investors.
Employment, being good for the economy, creating useful products or services. All these things are just unfortunate annoyances to corporations.
When times are good, companies often just start hiring away. It looks good on some measures as it makes them look like a growing company and most managers prefer a bigger staff than a smaller one. During good economic times, it looks bad for a company to have layoffs to right size an organization so companies will just keep people around until there is a recession. When that happens, every company uses the recession as an excuse to trim payroll. This “every company trimming payroll at the same time” phenomenon drastically increases the depth of a recession.
IMO, companies are using AI as cover to get rid of people and downsize for profit purposes. Wall Street isn’t going to recognize such a company as struggling right now, just being “pro active”.
They’re talking to their shareholders.
They don’t talk to you. You don’t count.
Wait, aren’t we (formally) tolerating these people purely because they create a lot of jobs by running their companies well? And we don’t want all those jobs gone at once, so we don’t regulate the biggest companies too hard and bail them out should they fail.
So if they reduce their (human) workforce, wouldn’t it mean that them being afloat or doing well is no longer necessary?
Gonna be a lot more Luigis and Devans in the future
That’s fine, that’s what they are supposed to do. Jobs are for production, not created just to employ people. Internet and computers had the same effect on plenty of businesses, it just the new tech also creates new jobs that could not have existed previously. That’s generally how new tech always works, not something unique to AI. These are all just forms of automation and when you automate you don’t need as many workers to do the same job. It’s not more complicated than that.
What most of you don’t get is that when you automate you lower costs and those lower costs allow for new opportunities that did not exist before, hence why we have not automated ourselves out of jobs decades ago.
It’s like you get to the job replacement part of automation and your brains just shut off. You don’t compare it to the history of automation or just apply some rational thought that new tools create new jobs, and you wind up with this same argument every few decades about how Automation X will take all our jobs… yet it never does.
If people are afraid of losing their job to AI, they are likely to accept lower salaries.
Need them to go to more Coldplay concerts… this way we can do with them what they do with workers… cancel them. Difference here is that we would do it more publically with embarrassment to ensure they don’t get another job anytime soon.
They’re talking to shareholders, who like cuts in operational expanses.
That being said, there’s two ways you can consider AI from a profit generating perspective.
You can consider that AI will augment the capabilities of your current workforce, increase productivity and thus bring in more profit.
You can consider that AI will replace the capabilities of your current workforce, drive operational expanses down and thus bring in more profit.
It’s going to be interesting to see what path which company chooses.
My personal opinion on this is that the big winners will be those who chose option A. Their workforce will be more productive, bring in more profit, allow for growth and why not even more recruitment of workers enhanced with AI-based tools and snowball from there.
Those who choose option B will run straight into the wall because lack of human oversight will decrease the quality of their production and drive customers away.
The people that think AIs will do it all are dumbasses. AIs work at their best when they are small, modular tools focused on one specific, consistent, repeatable tasks. They already allow for so much more flexiblity in their workflow than binary algorithms, and that’s all we need.
The companies that will look to build, or use, AIs in that way to provide their workforce with automated tools, solutions, robots, etc so they can do their job faster, better, and in better conditions, will be the big winners if the AI era.
Why isn’t the CEO the first to be exchanged for an AI? Perhaps an AI would be better at planning for the long term, because most of the CEOs only seem to be looking to the end of the quarter.
Yes. Just like in 21 and 22 when they publicly boasted on earnings calls about how they increased prices without consumer or customer pushback. But that was Biden’s fault. Cause, you know, between commercials on conservative media, the mouth breathers are definitely listening to earnings calls.
I think everyone should read “Player Piano” by Kurt Vonnegut at least once.
Especially CEOs.
I just completed a class on HRM and the HR association of my country published an article on AI stating that most people who use generative AI are management and other desk jobs.
They also said that companies should help production employees learn how to use and integrate AI in their jobs. Who are they lying to? Themselves? We clearly see, day after day, how companies are looking to replace their workforce for gen. AI.
This is why i despise businesses programs. They all go around promoting innovation through some weird toxic positivity around capitalism. Marketing can be used to exploit consumers? Yes. We’ll still teach you how. Just like econ majors saying “deficiencies in the market are dealt with by the government” when the government ain’t doing shit but serving their greedy asses.
The current manifestation of AI in business is a bubble. It’s not realistic nor sustainable long term. This is obvious to everyone (except consumers, who don’t really care) – it’s just that the CEOs don’t care (since by the time the bubble bursts, they’ll already have gotten their payout and will already be working on whatever is their next evil plan to get richer) and workers are powerless (they can’t complain, otherwise they’ll lose their jobs even sooner, due to not being “in line with company strategy”).
AI itself is pretty cool btw. Has existed for a long time, and always will. What isn’t sustainable is the way companies are using it (and consumers are consuming it), which will inevitably lead to the breakdown of a bunch of institutions and systems, including the arts and entertainment. It will be years until this can be rebuilt, if we’re lucky. Unfortunately humanity has a nasty tendency to be lazy, so we might simply embrace the dumbification of everything and remain stuck in this inhumane broken new world forever
Anyway, what’s for breakfast
For them it is a matter of money. With AI they reduce staff and supposedly make more money. But it remains to be seen how much investment in AI will have a return in benefits. In the short term, of course, layoffs will make them reduce costs in human resources, but the costs in AI are too high to be able to make them profitable. Now we have to face thousands and thousands of layoffs, a drop in consumption and recession. Let’s see if AI is going to cost us…
Another way to say this, CEOs boasting about boosting unemployment and increasing wealth disparity.