if a manager says that instead of seeing the opportunity to reassign staff and expand, the manager needs to be replaced by AI immediately
Just become an AI consultant and triple your salary.
41% of execs maybe
Must be nice to just throw “A” in front of all your half-baked personal plans to instantly justify them.
Can’t wait for the 94% unemployed to raid the banks and eat the Bankers.
AI will (be a great excuse to) reduce workforce, say 41% of people who get bonuses if they do.
Game’s changed. Now we fire people, try to rehire them for less money and if that doesn’t work we demand policy changes and less labour protection to counter the “labour shortage”.
Labor shortage is such a funny term. It’s like coming to a store and looking for 1kg of meat for 1$, not finding it and saying there’s meat shortage. Or coming to a vegetarian store and looking for 1kg of any meat and saying the same.
When everybody is employed, but the economy needs more people - that’s labor shortage. When there are people looking for jobs, but not satisfied with particular offerings - that’s something else.
And that means lower prices for consumers. Right? Guys… r… right?
And that means lower prices for consumers. Right? Guys… r… right?
No, but it does mean 41%fewer people can afford to buy these companies products, you cheapass shortsighted corporate fucks.
41% is the number of executives that think AI will reduce their work force, not the number of jobs they expect to replace.
Your point stands though.
ITT: bunch of people who have no idea what AI even means
This is kind of like the early days of computers or internet all over again. LLMs is not what educated people mean when they’re talking about AI. ChatGPT is not going to take your jobs, AGI will. Nobody just knows when. Might be next year or it might take 2 decades.
Enlighten us, oh knowledgeable one, what is AI?
Say execs. You know, the people who view labor as a cost center.
They say that because that’s what they want to happen, not because it’s a good idea.
Freeing humans from toil is a good idea, just like the industrial revolution was. We just need our system to adapt and change with this new reality, AGI and universal basic income means we could live in something like the society in star trek.
I’m sure that’s what execs are talking about.
Doesn’t matter what the execs say, it will happen and it will become easier and easier to start your own business. They are automating themselves out of a high paying job.
And only 41%.
I’ve advised past clients to avoid reducing headcount and instead be looking at how they can scale up productivity.
It’s honestly pretty bizarre to me that so many people think this is going to result in the same amount of work with less people. Maybe in the short term a number of companies will go that way, but not long after they’ll be out of business.
Long term, the companies that are going to survive the coming tides of change are going to be the ones that aggressively do more and try to grow and expand what they do as much as possible.
Effective monopolies are going out the window, and the diminishing returns of large corporations are going to be going head to head with a legion of new entrants with orders of magnitude more efficiency and ambition.
This is definitely one of those periods in time where the focus on a quarterly return is going to turn out to be a cyanide pill.
Yup, and there’s a lot you can do to increase productivity:
- less time wasted in useless meetings - I’ve been able to cut ours
- more time off - less burnout means more productivity
- flexible work schedules - life happens, and I’m a lot more willing to put in the extra effort today if I know I can go home early the next day
- automate the boring parts - there are some fantastic applications of AI, so introduce them as tools, not replacements
- profit sharing - if the company does well, don’t do layoffs, do bigger bonuses or stock options
- cut exec pay when times get hard - it may not materially help reduce layoffs, but it certainly helps morale to see your leaders suffering with you
And so on. Basically, treat your employees with respect and they’ll work hard for you.
Short term is all that matters. Business fails? Start another one, and now you have a bunch of people that you made unemployed creating downward pressure on labor prices.
No, you have a lot of people you made unemployed competing with you.
This is already what’s happening in the video game industry. A ton of people have lost their jobs, and VC money has recently come pouring in trying to flip the displaced talent into the next big success.
And they’ll probably do it. A number of the larger publishers are really struggling to succeed with titles that are bombing left and right as a result of poor executive oversight on attempted cash grabs to please the short term market.
Look at Ubisoft’s 5-year stock price.
Short term is definitely not all that matters, and it’s a rude awakening for those that think it’s the case.
Mostly the execs don’t care. They’ve extracted “value” in the form of money and got paid, that’s the extent if their ability to look forward. The faster they make that happen the faster they can do it again, probably somewhere else. They don’t give a single shit what happens after.
It really depends on the exec.
Like most people, there’s a range.
Many are certainly unpleasant. But there’s also ones that buck the trend.
Yeah, and there are a few good lawyers and a few good cops and (probably) a few good politicians too, but we’re not talking about the few exceptions here.
Well, we kind of are as the shitty ones tend to fail after time and the good ones continue to succeed, so in a market that’s much more competitive because of a force multiplier on labor unlike anything the world has seen there’s not going to be much room for the crappy execs for very long.
Bad execs are like mosquitos. They thrive in stagnant waters, but as soon as things get moving they tend to reduce in number.
We’ve been in a fairly stagnant market since around 2008 for most things with no need for adaptation by large companies.
The large companies that went out of business recently have pretty much all been from financial mismanagement and not product/market fit like Circuit City or Blockbuster from the last time adaptation was needed with those failing to adapt going out of business.
The fatalism on Lemmy is fairly exhausting. The past decade shouldn’t be used as a reference point for predicting the next decade. The factors playing into each couldn’t be more different.
How do you arrive at effective monopolies are going out the window, squaring it with what we see in the world today which runs counter.
There’s diminishing returns on labor for large companies and an order of magnitude labor multiplier in the process of arriving.
For example, if you watched this past week’s Jon Stewart, you saw an opening segment about the threat of AI taking people’s jobs and then a great interview with the head of the FTC talking about how they try to go after monopolistic firms. One of the discussion points was that often when they go up against companies that can hire unlimited lawyers they’ll be outmatched by 10:1.
So the FTC with 1,200 employees can only do so much, and the companies they go up against can hire up to the point of diminishing returns on more legal resources.
What do you think happens when AI capable of a 10x multipler in productivity at low cost is available for legal tasks? The large companies are already hiring to the point there’s not much more benefit to more labor. But the FTC is trying to do as much as they can with a tenth the resources.
Across pretty much every industry companies or regulators a fraction of the size of effective monopolies are going to be able to go toe to toe with the big guys for deskwork over the coming years.
Blue collar bottlenecks and physical infrastructure (like Amazon warehouses and trucks) will remain a moat, but for everything else competition against Goliaths is about to get a major power up.
Bye bye middle management!
But seriously, work will always expand to the available workforce. That’s why there are so many stupid industries. They always tank during a resession, but other industries will expand to use excess labor.
“41% of execs display anomalous sexual prowess, 9” dongs thought to play a role.”
It’ll reduce the workforce from well-remunerated professionals who perform tasks to a larger number of disposable minimum-wage labourers who clean up botshit.
Pretty sure the entire Republican party and the ruling class they serve just orgasmed at that thought.
And as a result the remaining workforce will have to work more.
Eventually the entire economy will be just one overworked australian man.
Quiet, mate. Pulling the empty carts is the closest thing we get to sleep.
Execs? The same people who make short sighted decisions and don’t understand basic psychology? Let me go get a pen so I won’t…give two fucks what this bogus survey says. Let AI run your business so I can have some excitement in my life
They don’t care. Jack Welch’s ghost must be fed by destroying more companies for short term gain.
That only shows what they hope will happen. In reality menial tasks can be automated and humans can be shifted to more creative roles, which in all honesty means execs could be reduced and replaced by AI. They do nothing other than follow trail of money and waste company resources, something AI can be much more efficient at.
humans can be shifted to more creative roles
It’s a fallacy to assume that there will always be enough jobs for everyone who wants a job.
It has been the case for a while now despite same being said for every important technological advancement.
Also I’ve met enough people with “ideas” that I reject the premise. Really creative talented people are rare.
Agreed, specialist roles will survive this. Management roles, might not.
People here keep belittling AI. You’re all wrong, at least when considering the long run… We can’t beat it. We need to outlaw it.
Train it to replace CEO’s.
Y’all are dumbass doomers. Have some fun with AI while your can you some aged peasants. We were always fucked.
Outlawing it is a very dangerous aim, because outlawing it completely will enable other countries to out-compete us, and a outlawing it completely is right next to “outlaw it for normal people, but allow companies to exploit it for profit” on the dart board of possibilities.
Better path all around is “allow everyone to use AI and establish strong social safety nets and move towards enabling people to work less”.
If AI is outlawed, only outlaws will have AI
Haven’t I been hearing that since the rise of computing and the internet? And it’s probably been around even longer. Seems like this sort of stuff only gets going when a lot of workers start putting up a fight.
But hey, maybe 41% jobs lost might be the tipping point. Because people aren’t just gonna sit on the sidewalk and starve.
“Smash the looms” is the wrong idea.
“Eat the rich” might have some merit though.
Yeah, don’t smash the looms, seize them. The ability to make labor easier and more efficient is a positive if we don’t allow it to be a means to impoverish the workers
It’s Schrödinger’s AI. It is both useless and will replace everyone. Depending on the agenda the particular person is trying to push.
We need to outlaw it.
Train it to replace CEO’s.Oh, there it goes again.
I know it’s getting boring. I am tried of people telling me how chatgpt and friends are toys that just spit back website data and in the same comment telling me how they are basically angry gods ready to end the human race.
Fucking make up your mind!
Nah, I disagree on both counts.
We can’t beat it. We need to outlaw it.
Is the intent here to preserve jobs even if it’s less productive? That’s solving the wrong problem. Instead of banning it, we should be adapting to it. If AI is more efficient than people, the jobs people take should change.
I think there’s a solid case that if something would devolve into rent-seeking because competition is unproductive, it should be provided as a public service. Do you need a job if all of your basic needs are met by AI? At that point, any work you do would be optional, so people would follow their passions instead of working to make ends meet (see: Star Trek universe).
Think of it like Basic Income, but instead of cash, you’d get services at-cost. I think there’s room for non-profits (or maybe the government) to provide these AI-services at-cost.
This is why not every business is successful I guess
