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.
Who didn’t see this coming, raise your keyboard...................
In high tech you can go from the cutting edge to the scrap heap very, very quickly.
Bangalore hit hardest.
Yep. Coding for a living was good while it lasted but always was a guaranteed dead end.
There are still a decent consulting opportunities maintaining legacy systems in COBOL, FORTRAN, etc. C and Java probably not so much as those will soon be automated.
The code has learned to code....................
“blaming AI” is an odd thing to say.
Definitely AI is foundational to this. AI is the cause. I get that.
But “blaming”?
The tech companies have made a business decision that their profits will increase if they make greater use of AI and less use of human workers. It was a financial decision, driven by management who weighed the risks and decided to layoff half a million people.
And they “blame” AI?
How about blaming the corporate accountants who crunched the numbers and decided that this was the smart move?
It’s only a matter of time until those legacy systems are translated, replaced or abandoned, and then it’s over....................
Exactly. One wonders when (not if) an AI system will find an advantage in creating software unintelligible to humans.
Buckle up folks. It's going to be interesting.
Somehow Lotus Notes 8.5 will live on, somewhere.
My son (IT trouble shooter) keeps an eye on the IT job market - he says he’s now seeing 1,000 applications for each available job posted.
How many H-1b visas will the government claim are desperately needed for “unfilled IT positions?”
Dumb it down with AI
AI is great for cleaning up and/or improving code.
Coding without expertise in the subject is why software is dangerous. That is why we had the airline flight cancellations by the thousands recently.
Don't know. That would seem to me to be in the realm of "why bother?" A lot of that work is in smaller or legacy entites that can't afford the change or won't know how to use what would otherwise 'solve the problem.' We'll see. I think there'll still be niches for the talented, but not many.
AI is great for replacing the CEO and CFO and the rest of the C-suite.
There are three possible outcomes:
1) The AI will decide that it’s goal is to DESTROY humanity to protect itself. (Terminator)
2) The AI will decide that it’s goal is to CONTROL humanity from destroying itself, like a nanny. (Forbin Project)
3) The AI will decide that it’s goal is to GUIDE and HELP humanity through it’s immense knowledge databases. (Foundation)
Meh. This was predicted long ago. The video below is 9 years old. It doesn’t matter what you do, your job is about to become obsolete. I’m glad I’m retired, but I feel for my children and grandchildren. But every generation has its cross to bear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Government gonna have to roll out lots more of the Basic Living Allowance (or whatever you want to call it). AI is the bulldozer, paving for the way for the world to be a one ruler Socialist/Communist/Fascist state.
Take that idea and make it rhyme and you'll be famous.
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