Posted on 07/24/2024 7:23:13 AM PDT by Red Badger
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge.
Big Tech is slashing jobs—half a million and counting. And it’s blaming artificial intelligence.
A new study by Layoffs.fyi reports that layoffs in the tech industry have exceeded 100,000 so far this year —and keep in mind that the year’s only half over. That’s on top of 212,000 tech layoffs last year. And 165,000 in 2022.
Recent layoffs include Microsoft and Facebook, which each cut 10,000 jobs. Cisco dropped 4,000, Intuit 1,800. Even Amazon and Apple are laying off.
Part of this is the slowing economy, part of it is the hangover from the 2020 hiring binge. But what’s interesting is that now Big Tech is blaming AI for the mass layoffs.
Microsoft announced a multibillion-dollar investment into AI the same day it announced those 10,000 layoffs. Facebook announced plans for “investing heavily in AI” in the same letter it used to lay off 10,000 workers. Intuit followed its mass layoffs by declaring that companies that don’t go all-in on AI will die.
Essentially, tech companies are slashing entire armies of workers and replacing them with a few people who can use AI. The net is a wipe-out in tech jobs—half a million and counting. In fact, for the first time since the 2000 dot-com bust, IT unemployment is actually higher than U.S. unemployment overall.
When I used to give career advice to my MBAs, I joked that going into tech is like becoming a stripper—you make a lot when you’re young, but it goes down fast. Even today you can find former senior programmers driving an Uber or mowing lawns, aged out of a fast-changing industry.
That’s about to get a lot worse.
Of course, AI has its own problems, including hallucinations that invent information and phenomena that don’t exist. Google pulled an AI blunder after it assured users that cockroaches living in a penis is totally normal, indeed that’s how they got their name.
Chatbots have gone rogue, cursing out and threatening users or writing poems about how bad their company is. Lawyer chatbots invent cases. Air Canada’s chatbot promised customers refunds that didn’t exist—which the airline had to honor.
Still, AI is improving faster than human programmers are improving.
Moreover, tech is just the canary in the coal mine, given how rote many tech jobs are. A recent study by Citibank found that 54% of the jobs in banking can be replaced by AI, and another 12% augmented by AI —so lay off the current worker and hire somebody else. That’s 66% of jobs at risk of replacement or elimination.
Many industries are more like banking than tech in terms of workflow, so that could come to a whole lot of layoffs.
So what’s next, brought to you by Unchained.com? Technological unemployment is centuries old, from the mechanization of agriculture to container shipping to the internet. Usually, the tech itself makes us richer, which leads to new jobs that actually pay better.
But there are also failures where the old jobs went away and nothing replaced them. Detroit with cars, or the forest of factories that used to exist in South Philly or Baltimore. New jobs were created, sure, but they went to Dallas or Atlanta—places that were more business-friendly than the big government dystopias of a Detroit or a Baltimore.
So artificial intelligence is a threat to jobs, but it’s not the tech that’s the problem. It’s the mountain of regulations and taxes that threaten to turn America into a continent-sized Detroit.
There will always be jobs for innovators and entrepreneurs.
Find a need and fill it.
Create your own job.
Don’t go with the flow, direct it...............
In other words, there is still an awful lot of human thinking and creativity that is required before AI can do anything.
The jobs that are being eliminated are those that are rote and don't require thinking. In fact, as some folks have said, AI doesn't eliminate jobs, per se, it eliminates tasks (i.e., components of jobs). Productive people become even more productive and less productive people get fired.
This is not a bad thing.
Exactly. The cutting edge is all about disruption. And those who develop disruptive technologies today are themselves subject to disruption tomorrow.
You are absolutely right. One cannot hope to control any process with computers unless one had a thorough understanding of the the process. Some geek in an office has no understanding of how an aircraft flies or a power plant works. And enough of this AI nonsense. There is no such thing. There in fact seems to be a distinct lack of actual intelligence. There are incredibly capable algorithms and machines but they are not intelligent. They don’t reason. An idiot savant is not a polymath.
It will be the third, but with an iron fist in charge. There are many jobs to do AI cannot do, especially those in which so little is known also involving dirt, rugged terrain, and remote from a power source also requiring intense visual and tactile capabilities. I have identified and am promoting such an industry that will also give humans significant leverage in an environment of liberty.
There is a lot of work to be done there.
And, lawyers, too!!!
Exactly!!
Sorry for the typo
The old joke seems to be coming true:
The factory of the future will have just two beings in it: A man and a dog.
The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the machines.
The man will be there to feed the dog...............
Don’t worry folks. “Conservative” Mumbai Mike and Vance will bring in millions of non-Christian 3rd world Indians to take the rest of the IT jobs from Americans. Just be happy that the corporations can save money by driving down labor costs and shut your mouth, ok?
p
market is tanking..
I am glad there are a few people such as yourself who understand software creation.
01100110010xv01010100100.................................
^^
New kid on the block
GOOD! Maybe they’ll stop screwing around with computer systems all the time and go back to making dancing paperclips. Leave the rest alone.
This is a lie that Big Tech or tech journalists are telling. Blaming job losses on AI is catchy and gets more clicks. AI may have a role in it but it’s nowhere near the main reason for the layoffs. Big Tech is simply deprioritizing entire divisions that don’t add to the company’s bottom line and getting rid of them. When times were good those were overlooked. Not any more.
Ping
There are a few things that inform me that AI will have somewhat limited application in the software world.
1) To design a system the size that I currently work on, you would need to write a specification the size of “War and Peace”.
2) You still need an advanced developer to ‘proof’ the code that AI produces.
Please elaborate via Freepmail and let us see if I can add value.
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