Companies Deploy AI To Curb Hiring as 'Cost Avoidance' Gains Ground (msn.com) 112
U.S. companies are increasingly using AI to curb hiring plans, citing "cost avoidance" as a key metric to justify AI investments amid pressure to show returns. At software firm TS Imagine, AI-powered email sorting saves 4,000 work hours annually at 3% of employee costs, while Palantir reported AI reduced future headcount needs by 10-15%, according to company executives.
The trend is most pronounced in software development and customer service sectors, where companies are deferring or scaling back hiring plans, said Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran. This shift comes as long-term unemployment in the U.S. has risen more than 50% since late 2022, though tech sector unemployment dropped to 2% in December.
The trend is most pronounced in software development and customer service sectors, where companies are deferring or scaling back hiring plans, said Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran. This shift comes as long-term unemployment in the U.S. has risen more than 50% since late 2022, though tech sector unemployment dropped to 2% in December.
We are not ready (Score:5, Insightful)
When all the low end fruit is gone, all within a few years, and the tech is reaching higher every month... What do we do with so much of the population removed from the economy at once?
'Retrain' is not a valid option for such a large and rapid disruption. Neither is having faith that new jobs will magically appear.
Re:We are not ready (Score:5, Insightful)
We will do what we always do when half the population suddenly loses jobs - call them lazy, losers, and criminals, then burn out their Hoovervilles and try to push them away elsewhere. While everyone else is doing the same and trying to push them toward you.
History shows Americans have no problem demonizing and even mass murdering people that were neighbors and coworkers mere weeks before.
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At times like this, we must remember that we are a )&(*&^%^ Christian Nation. Christians have always liked a good Inquisition.
G-d: Jesus, it is time for your Second Coming.
Jesus: Jose' no way, they follow some clown with red hair now.
G-d: But the Christians need you.
Jesus: What they need is a lobotomy!
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We will do what we always do when half the population suddenly loses jobs - call them lazy, losers, and criminals, then burn out their Hoovervilles and try to push them away elsewhere. While everyone else is doing the same and trying to push them toward you. History shows Americans have no problem demonizing and even mass murdering people that were neighbors and coworkers mere weeks before.
History has never see a revolution like this before. Where humans don’t become merely temporarily unemployed, but permanently unemployable.
Greed pushing for this won’t be able to manhandle the part of the population not used to getting screwed over. The part of the population with the means and resources to respond and react when pushed.
Parent is correct. We are not even remotely ready for that chaos and disruption.
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History shows that when there are big changes in technology resulting in disruptions, we get riots, revolutions, wars and such.
The bigger the scale of the change, the bigger the disruption.
Re:We are not ready (Score:5, Informative)
Have you priced any plumbing work lately? Plumbers have more work than they can handle right now.
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This! Any local construction and likely any services. Just, who will be able to afford them? Not the one who work these jobs.
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And plumbing is one of the things that's difficult to automate. But it also takes several years to learn to do it well, outside of the really basic stuff.
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If you know basic plumbing, you can start with small jobs by advertising on Craigslist, Fivver, TaskRabbit, etc.
No license is required for jobs under $500.
Learn more complex plumbing skills from YouTube videos.
Then, work your way up. At some point, get a contractor license, which isn't too hard.
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One way to end up learning the trades is to buy a RV in the US, be it a travel trailer, motorhome, or whatnot. The quality is "meh" to just plain horrific, and you will wind up learning plumbing, electrical, HVAC, structural stuff, and even welding as time goes on. For example, the crimp connectors to my water heater decided to start leaking, so I replaced them with PEX-A and Uponor fittings, using a Milwaukee PEX expander. Not cheap for the tool, but the connectors and fittings are cheap, and easily can
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the crimp connectors to my water heater decided to start leaking, so I replaced them with PEX-A and Uponor fittings, using a Milwaukee PEX expander. Not cheap for the tool, but the connectors and fittings are cheap, and easily can handle the vibrations in a RV.
You shoulda used Flair-It instead of ProPex. The tool is cheap and can even be skipped (but don't), and the plastic fittings are less likely to cause leaks later than using a plastic snap clamp. You heat the pex up a little with a heat gun (just until the cut edge of the tubing becomes transparent and not translucent, or for colored PEX, shiny) and then it just slides on the barb.
Tossing wire nuts for Wagos
Wagos fail a lot in an RV application due to moisture and vibration and a lot of techs never use them. Wire nuts are fine if you
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Which Flair-It? There are the fittings that can be applied by hand or a wrench, and they have other types like a ratcheting clamp (Pexlock). I have worried about them working loose. However, anything is better than Sharkbite fittings, IMHO (due to that single O-ring being the only thing keeping the water in.)
Converrter-wise, it is a no name single stage (Progressive Power), from 2011. I'm looking at a Progressive Dynamics, or just bite the bullet and get a good converter/inverter from PD or Victron. I
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Learn more complex plumbing skills from YouTube videos.
That's a great idea because both the internet and plumbing are a series of tubes. And with YouTube you'll have good turnaround.
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Congress and el Bunko have not yet figured out that the shipyards are chock full of immigrant labor because native born Americans either cannot or will not do those jobs. So their dreams of a Big Navy are just pipe dreams. Seems like they could use a few good plumbers to explain how piping networks work....but I doubt they could understand.
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There is a lot of work that can't be done with AI. Plumbers, electricians are just one thing, but AC techs, auto mechanics, woodworking. Until we get ASI that can make robots that can handle weird environments, bad weather, flaky tools, and conflicting directions, it is going to be people that run the kitchens and dining halls.
How many trillions of dollars have businesses thrown at AI to replace the short order chef at a fast food joint?
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When all the low end fruit is gone, all within a few years, and the tech is reaching higher every month... What do we do with so much of the population removed from the economy at once?
'Retrain' is not a valid option for such a large and rapid disruption. Neither is having faith that new jobs will magically appear.
Soylent Green.
I say that half jokingly, but in the end, we as a people won't decide the future. It's being decided by the tech-bros pushing this shit, and by the government which is now if not firmly in their pockets, are actually being replaced by tech bros themselves. Those folks have decided AI is the future, and C Suites are believing them enough to go for it, regardless of what reality may pan out to be. I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the United States, we love to avoid thinking about
Re:We are not ready (Score:5, Interesting)
I would not be surprised to see the killing of CEO Brian Thompson to be the first of more as the consequence of widening the gap between the haves and have-nots through applied (and misused) technology.
Guy Fawkes will rise again.
Re:We are not ready (Score:5, Interesting)
I maintain it is unethical to hold billions in wealth, and ethical to kill billionaires. The wealth gap will continue to grow. They will use the system to hoard all wealth and make us slaves dependent on their whims, it's human nature.
Billionaires are not going to fix the issue, as they are its beneficiaries and the prime force behind its acceleration.
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It's not the holding of the wealth that's unethical. It depends on how you got it, and what you do with it.
- - -
This next part is an argument about why people reacted in the way they did to that particular murder:
In the case of the "health insurance" industry, there are a lot of promises made that there is no intent to keep. The money is coercively extracted, which is almost justifiable, but then it's seen as "my money", so they hire teams of people to keep from having to pay it out again.
OTOH, th
Re: We are not ready (Score:3)
"It's not the holding of the wealth that's unethical."
Yes, it absolutely is. If you don't at least invest it or preferably spend it then it doesn't employ people and then they become destitute in a world which tries to enslave such people, and failing that, murder them.
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I maintain it is unethical to hold billions in wealth, and ethical to kill billionaires. The wealth gap will continue to grow. They will use the system to hoard all wealth and make us slaves dependent on their whims, it's human nature.
Or perhaps they will maintain that it is unethical to let the unemployable proles starve, and ethical to hunt them down with Terminator-style euthenasia-bots to "end their suffering". Once you announce that murder is ethical because reasons, you open the door for other people to think along similar lines.
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Historically, the rich build walls and hire guards to keep the dirty poors out of sight. Then they consider them beneath them. Disposable. Most they leave to rot, but any that become an annoyance get the guards set on them.
When there are too many poor people next to fabulously wealthy people, this is historically inevitable. You get brutal oppression until there is a revolution. Good luck next time, because the rich will have robots.
It may not end up that way... (Score:2)
Another way the playing field gets leveled is when something happens and there just are not enough backs for the royalty to break. For example, the Black Death got rid of so many people that the nobility just couldn't kill people or break them on the wheel to keep order. Not for a lack of trying. Eventually even they caved in, creating the middle class which lasted until relatively recently.
With how fast disease can spread, coupled with all the CRISPR labs hidden out there with people who are working to
Re: We are not ready (Score:4, Insightful)
"Once you announce that murder is ethical because reasons, you open the door for other people to think along similar lines."
The billionaires already don't care who has to die to support their lifestyle so long as it isn't them, so what you're claiming will happening is what is already happening and it's a meaningless objection.
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I maintain it is unethical to hold billions in wealth, and ethical to kill billionaires.
Brian Thompson wasn't a billionaire.
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It doesn't matter. That number represents power, and they can wield it. That is what matters.
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I would not be surprised to see the killing of CEO Brian Thompson to be the first of more
Nope. The killing of CEO Brian Thompson presages the last of CEOs wandering around without bodyguards; increasing the wall between the haves and have-nots,
...Guy Fawkes will rise again.
In 420 years since Guy Fawkes' gunpowder plot, nobody has blown up Parliament, so I'll say that Guy Fawkes is not a good example of "the first of more."
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Supply [Re:We are not ready] (Score:2)
Bodyguards will get more expensive then. Supply and demand in action.
There is no shortage of people who like to play with guns and consider themselves tough guys, so the "supply" side of supply and demand is "plenty". And Brian Thompson was paid salary, bonus and stock options of $10.2 million a year. The company can afford a handful of bodyguards.
Unless of course they can robotize them. I suspect the ultimate wet dream of the 11 digit+ club (10 is so pre-2020) is to surround themselves with AI based robots that do what they are told 24x7.
Probably
Either that, or neural implants into meat sacks that can be controlled by a button press.
Maybe if Elon Musk is in charge.
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I would not be surprised to see the killing of CEO Brian Thompson to be the first of more as the consequence of widening the gap between the haves and have-nots through applied (and misused) technology.
Guy Fawkes will rise again.
I don't necessarily disagree with your sentiment, throwing the rich onto the spears of the soldiers is a time honoured tradition (or maybe you'd prefer defenestration) Guy Fawkes is a terrible example. He's pretty much a man of the establishment.
Fawkes was just a guard, who was caught under the houses of parliament with a load of gunpowder, he wasn't the leader and was also caught with his pants down, captured without a fight. However as I said, he wasn't the leader.
The leader was a man named Robert C
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"...and the tech is reaching higher every month..."
What does that mean?
"What do we do with so much of the population removed from the economy at once?"
Throw them into camps?
You are aware of the political climate, right? Think of unemployment as complementary to population reduction, like billionaires do. Sam Altman doesn't care about "disruption" beyond the money he gets, he lets his sister be homeless despite his billions, after all.
Re:We are not ready (Score:5, Insightful)
What do we do with so much of the population removed from the economy at once?
While company A brags about the cost savings of replacing their call center staff with voice chat bots, company B sees this as an opportunity to differentiate themselves by offering customer service with live human beings. Every erosion in customer experience is a new opportunity for a competitor.
Likewise companies C and D both see that AI is making them more profitable, somehow. Company D sees the opportunity to pull ahead of company C by hiring more people who know how to work with AI. Every new innovation is an opportunity to pull ahead of your competitors.
In all cases, no matter how much automation improves your company, out-performing your competitors often involves out-hiring them, and this will continue. Site note: this by no means takes away from efficiency gains that sometimes manifest as firing. Both can be true. I don't see AI as a guaranteed efficiency gain yet.
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When phone trees started becoming a thing, sure there were a *few* holdouts to brag on their human experience, but ultimately almost all of those big companies adopted them. Phone trees are utterly trash next to what LLMs can enable. Given how trivial, short and to the point a lot of customer service engagement is, it's possible that most users won't even notice a difference, certainly compared to phone tree or scripted chat bots. Incidentally people like the scripted chat bots... when they work. They i
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You left out "legally required paperwork". I think that's going to be a big one, once the AI can handle it as well, or even almost as well, as the people can.
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Ah yes, it's ludicrous but believable to have the following flow:
-I have a short and to the point text, LLM, please lawyer this up into stupidly long and convoluted language appropriate for legal BS
-LLM, please take this lawyered up text that you generated and give me some short and to the point text that I can actually understand.
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"What LLM can enable", does this mean they are already doing this, or only what AI marketing is claiming? And if they are using it, where as the stats that it performs well?
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I won't say they are great, or 'performs well', but the chatbots and phone trees of today are even worse, yet they are widely deployed.
The bar is not "as good as a human" the bar is "good enough to be passable in some cases".
Hypothetically they may not trust LLM to do inside sales, as they want their best foot forward, but an existing customer needs support? The bar is now "can be a bit bad, but at least passable enough we might get their return business".
In a *lot* of technology applications, a human is ob
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That only works when management of Company B and Company D see the value in having honest to goodness people on the payroll.
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"We don't hire honest people because we've found them to be financial detriment."
I don't think that's really true anymore (Score:2)
You take that money and undercut your competitors on price. People will always take the cheaper option 1st. No matter how many times customers report service matters price matters more. Especially with inflation being what it is.
I can tell you that I've worked for companies that have specialty teams for high value customers, and during economic downturns like 2008 those teams get cut back or cut entirely. That's because companies know price is go
One more thing (Score:1)
They keep getting caught colluding and they keep getting slaps on the wrist. And, well, with the administration changing I'm not even sure they'll get those wrist slaps anymore.
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Re: We are not ready (Score:2)
Dealerships are usually the worst place to go for service. They are notorious for doing things you didn't ask them to do, like my local Nissan dealer (McCrea in Eureka CA) who un-rotated my tires (which had been rotated a week earlier) and then charged me for it when I went in for an oil change. Never go to a dealer except for warranty service, when they may actually give you a loaner.
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What do we do with so much of the population removed from the economy at once?
While company A brags about the cost savings of replacing their call center staff with voice chat bots, company B sees this as an opportunity to differentiate themselves by offering customer service with live human beings. Every erosion in customer experience is a new opportunity for a competitor.
Likewise companies C and D both see that AI is making them more profitable, somehow. Company D sees the opportunity to pull ahead of company C by hiring more people who know how to work with AI. Every new innovation is an opportunity to pull ahead of your competitors.
In all cases, no matter how much automation improves your company, out-performing your competitors often involves out-hiring them, and this will continue. Site note: this by no means takes away from efficiency gains that sometimes manifest as firing. Both can be true. I don't see AI as a guaranteed efficiency gain yet.
Every time there is a new form of automation there are cries that it will destroy jobs and send civilisation into a death spiral. The ATM will put all the bank clerks out of work and there will be no money to be had. The automated exchange will put all the telephone operators out of work and no-one will be able to afford to call anyone... The automated checkout will void the store of staff. Whilst some roles became redundant, generally staff levels went up rather than down as new roles were found, supermark
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When all the low end fruit is gone, all within a few years, and the tech is reaching higher every month... What do we do with so much of the population removed from the economy at once?
'Retrain' is not a valid option for such a large and rapid disruption. Neither is having faith that new jobs will magically appear.
Unemployed people don't buy much. I suspect a tipping point when companies discover if no one has money, their cost savings won't mean crap if no one can afford their products. I've already worked to find new skillsets over the years, and it has always worked. That definitely doesn't mean it always will.
Like you, having faith that millions of high paying jobs will sprout up because the have in the past is a losers bet.
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The old philosophy of Henry Ford who paid his people a decent wage, because he wanted people to afford his vehicles is long gone. The prevailing philosophy doesn't care about that, because the execs have golden parachutes. If a company tanks, they just buy a new yacht and go on a sabbatical for a few years, and get hired somewhere else. There is a huge disconnect now between shareholders, who will jump between places in a heartbeat, and stakeholders, who really have something to lose if a company flops..
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The old philosophy of Henry Ford who paid his people a decent wage, because he wanted people to afford his vehicles is long gone. The prevailing philosophy doesn't care about that, because the execs have golden parachutes. If a company tanks, they just buy a new yacht and go on a sabbatical for a few years, and get hired somewhere else. There is a huge disconnect now between shareholders, who will jump between places in a heartbeat, and stakeholders, who really have something to lose if a company flops... and shareholder power far outweighs stakeholder power.
They really don't care if people are unemployed, as the secondary effect isn't something that is really cared about. I'm sure they think that if US people can't afford their stuff, then Chinese customers or UK/EU customers will.
Plus, when the company does go bankrupt, it all goes on the taxpayers' dime, so only stakeholders feel losses, as the shareholders have long since evacuated, perhaps a lot of them being notified to cut and run by internal contacts (since insider trading is all but not enforced.)
Crikeys dude, maybe pump the brakes a little, your approach and outlook has to be doing you harm.
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Ford didn't care whether his employees could buy his cars so long as someone could. He raised wages to stop loss to competitors who were hiring the employees he trained away from him. Remember, businesses used to train workers.
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When all the low end fruit is gone, all within a few years, and the tech is reaching higher every month... What do we do with so much of the population removed from the economy at once?
'Retrain' is not a valid option for such a large and rapid disruption. Neither is having faith that new jobs will magically appear.
The "low-end fruit" will be pruned in a similar way to layoffs by private equity. Some of the people really aren't needed, but many of the cuts will be strategically bad. Either way, layoffs stop and are reversed when companies have to compete and there is a competitor that is hiring, increasing revenue, and grabbing market share. There isn't much difference whether the cutbacks are due to AI or MBAs. The economic effect is the same, and the remedy is also the same.
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We've had the disruption of the transition from Manufacturing to Service (which people are still wining about 60-ish years since it started.) And then again when Women's workplace rate rapidly increase in the 70s and 80s.
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This question only makes sense if AI is actually able to reduce the need for employees, as much as the sales pitches claim.
Meanwhile, SalesForce is hiring 2,000 people to sell it's AI sales product. https://techcrunch.com/2024/12... [techcrunch.com] If their AI is so good at selling stuff, why don't they just let AI do the job?
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All the unemployed will become pole dancers. It's okay, booze will be free such that body esthetics won't matter.
Bots can't currently do this job because they short circuit when [bleeped] in their [bleep].
Not really, no. (Score:2)
A liturgy and habitus of being a dignified human is going to a value in itself once robots are doing the bulk of any value add in work. Bullshit jobs are the precursor to that, and we already have plenty of those.
Start practicing being the best human you can be, because that already is the only thing left to do.
Going to the gym and doing yoga literally makes more sense than learning yet another PL at this point.
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The elite people that run the planet don't care about anything aside from their lifestyle norms. When AI and robots are available to replace all of these dirty poor people, they will gladly dispose of the dirty poor people, or at the very least, watch them suffer to death. Maybe they'll make a game show out of it all, for their amusement.
All they need is a reason (Score:4, Insightful)
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And then unsupervised AI models will feed on themselves and collapse [wikipedia.org], requiring companies to hire real people with real intelligence to keep them running. So there's still hope for humanity.
Now I understand why The Matrix needed humans, and it wasn't just to use them as batteries!
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And then they'll figure out that the AI didn't deliver on its promises (and I saying this as one who sees a lot of promise in AI), and they'll have to rehire a bunch of people they previously laid off.
Blacksmiths... (Score:2)
Yes this has happened before. How many blacksmiths are there today?
However, its unprecedented that its happening so quickly. In just a few years vs decades. That's going to be a problem.
Re:Blacksmiths... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes this has happened before. How many blacksmiths are there today?
However, its unprecedented that its happening so quickly. In just a few years vs decades. That's going to be a problem.
The point you seem to be missing is that the rate of dislocation you mentioned is actually the lesser problem here. The major problem is the scope of dislocation.
This tech will result in huge job losses across a huge range of skills and disciplines all at once. And there WON'T be a lot of job opportunities in new fields for which people might retrain and learn new skills. So-called AI, in combination with robotics, is poised to eliminate even burger-flipping jobs. Skilled tradespeople will probably be OK for a while - but what other jobs can you think of that will survive this transition to any meaningful degree?
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You would be surprised how many blacksmiths are out there. Not just the medieval/renaissance faires, but the SCA has many good blacksmiths.
I worked with someone at a MSP who got burned out (this was after a long outage.) He quit, sold his house, dumped his high-zoot car, bought himself a motorhome, and headed to places like Quartzite and Slab City for a couple years. After that, he came back, he got a job as a ranch hand. Over the years, he picked up woodcarving and blacksmithing. Now, he makes far mor
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It's not so unprecedented. Just 50 years ago, 31% of Americans worked in manufacturing jobs, today just 9,7%. https://eig.org/manufacturing-... [eig.org]. And yet we have unemployment around 4%.
That's about the same time scale we're talking about, and I suspect, the same level of success we'll see at replacing jobs with technology.
Why does increasing productivity curb hiring? (Score:2)
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Well, hypothetically if that savings happens, there's only so much scope before the company's business needs are "complete" with respect to the technology. Same reason even if they can afford more developers today, they don't want more because their current numbers can deal with what is asked of the business. So that number would decrease, if hypothetically LLM delivers in their situation.
Re: Why does increasing productivity curb hiring? (Score:2)
Re: Why does increasing productivity curb hiring? (Score:2)
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If the core mission of the company is producing these assets, sure.
A *lot* of the industry are working in companies where they are overhead, enabling internal offerings that are nothing more than a cost burden needed to keep the core mission alive.
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How much of their target market do they already serve? Excess production isn't necessarily a benefit.
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Lets say AI increases developer productivity by 50%. Would a company rather deliver twice as many features, or fire half the developers? Companies that see this as an opportunity for layoffs will see competitors who deliver more value leave them behind in the market.
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"Now AI is coming for all the bog standard code that people write."
Ok, people have been saying that for quite a while now. I work with these AI systems. Let me know when that happens.
"AI doesn't have to be better than you, only cheaper."
Uh huh. Do you know that bugs cost money? Sometimes *lots* of money? AI not being better than the average coder means that it will make more mistakes than the average coder. Rework time after it gets bounced back from Testing, or god forbid, QA? Yeah, not going to be a savin
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You're "sort of" correct, but you're ignoring lag time. By the time the BoD notices, all their local competitors will be in the same boat, and it will be only "foreign companies" that need to be defended from. And politics is the customary way to handle that. Import taxes and bans come to mind.
(Note that the claim that it's only foreign competitors will be a lie, but the local competition will be in a less price-sensitive segment of the market, so it won't really be competition. Like Apple vs. MS, you m
All aboard the hype train (Score:4, Insightful)
Companies believe the pitches from hypemongers, spend millions on crap generators, pain and failure ensue
Expect a tsunami of bad products and services followed by bankruptcies
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Yes, exactly. While I see the value of AI and use it daily, I don't buy the hype that we're on the verge of a layoff apocalypse.
Extreme cost avoidance means no one to sell to (Score:5, Insightful)
If AI eliminates most jobs, then you'll have no customers to sell to.
This doesn't have a good outcome:
1. The stock market will collapse. Because there are no customers who are able to pay for your products.
2. Social Security and Medicare will collapse. There are no workers contributing taxes to these.
So if this is taken to its final endpoint, there will be masses of starving un-housed people ready to revolt.
At this point there will be two choices:
1. Rework the government to support UBI and tax AI and robots to provide the necessary income.
2. Exterminate the starving un-housed masses through mass murder or voluntary euthanization.
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3) Hope the transition is gradual enough that the portion of the population not yet affected looks away while the affected starve and supports police brutality to protect them from the starving.
If I had to bet, it's option 3.
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It is already starting with the migrants. The migrants are powering a lot of U.S. industries (food, shipbuilding, construction, health care, etc.) and in the process propping up Social Security and Medicare. Half of the pop. seems to be happy shipping them somewhere else as long it isn't that half of the pop. doing it, they hire thugs like el Bunko and his Groupenfuher Homan. Do we hear a peep from the Christians? Nope.
And once the migrants are gone, the prices of everything they helped to produce will rise
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If AI eliminates most jobs, then you'll have no customers to sell to.
This doesn't have a good outcome:
1. The stock market will collapse. Because there are no customers who are able to pay for your products.
2. Social Security and Medicare will collapse. There are no workers contributing taxes to these.
So if this is taken to its final endpoint, there will be masses of starving un-housed people ready to revolt.
At this point there will be two choices:
1. Rework the government to support UBI and tax AI and robots to provide the necessary income. 2. Exterminate the starving un-housed masses through mass murder or voluntary euthanization.
The decision will be made based on which is more profitable to those at the top of the garbage dump we call society. I would guess killbots will be more profitable than UBI, so killbots it is. Euthanization may be offered early on, but when there aren't enough takers, the polite version will disappear in a rain of bullets. It will not be a quiet and peaceful passing for most. It will be forced on large segments of the population.
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1. The stock market will collapse. Because there are no customers who are able to pay for your products.
I would guess killbots will be more profitable than UBI
OK, but see point #1. Killbots bring about the collapse quicker.
This doesn't mean they won't do it, or that lots of us won't die before the collapse occurs, but it's still a bad plan because destabilization threatens the rich, too. Sooner or later the military revolts, and they have the power to reach out and touch someone.
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1. The stock market will collapse. Because there are no customers who are able to pay for your products.
I would guess killbots will be more profitable than UBI
OK, but see point #1. Killbots bring about the collapse quicker.
This doesn't mean they won't do it, or that lots of us won't die before the collapse occurs, but it's still a bad plan because destabilization threatens the rich, too. Sooner or later the military revolts, and they have the power to reach out and touch someone.
Replace the military with killbots. Who needs pesky humans trying to interpret orders when killbots just do? You expect the rich to be forward thinking enough to realize destabilization will have a negative effect on them? I don't. They seem hellbent on causing the collapse right now. Hell, Musk is out there preaching that we all need to prepare ourselves to suffer. Apparently he thinks he'll be immune from any negatives that society at large may go through. I have a funny feeling the rich at large aren't t
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You expect the rich to be forward thinking enough to realize destabilization will have a negative effect on them? I don't.
I don't either, read my comment.
Hell, Musk is out there preaching that we all need to prepare ourselves to suffer. Apparently he thinks he'll be immune from any negatives that society at large may go through. I have a funny feeling the rich at large aren't too far removed from his mentality. He's just the only one brazen enough to not shut up about it publicly.
Sure, I agree 100%. But you can't replace the military with killbots, because they can't do what boots on the ground can do. You have to have humans operate the killbots. The only reason nobody is making autonomous killbots is that IT security won't sustain it, but that's a good reason and even wealthy people can understand it since all those Apple accounts got compromised and celebs' nude pics showed up everywhere.
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If AI eliminates most jobs, then you'll have no customers to sell to.
This doesn't have a good outcome:
1. The stock market will collapse. Because there are no customers who are able to pay for your products.
2. Social Security and Medicare will collapse. There are no workers contributing taxes to these.
So if this is taken to its final endpoint, there will be masses of starving un-housed people ready to revolt.
At this point there will be two choices:
1. Rework the government to support UBI and tax AI and robots to provide the necessary income.
2. Exterminate the starving un-housed masses through mass murder or voluntary euthanization.
You're thinking long term... Stop that at once.
Fiduciary duty means that we have to maximise returns for this quarter... it doesn't matter about next year or even next quarter, as long as you hit your targets and get your bonus now, providing shareholder value immediately. Your golden parachute will ensure that you don't have to suffer any of the consequences of short term thinking in the future.
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Taxing AI is a Bill Gates idea. I've seen the shady games Gates played since the beginning and you should always question his true motives and how he skews good sounding things to his benefit.
You can not tax AI jobs. People like him will create loopholes around any such regulation! Have we not seen tons of schemes used to screw over people? The only way is to balance power by greatly taxing everybody who gets too much power: "the balance of powers" helps governments function better and far longer but that
Death and Taxes (Score:2)
If companies reduce their workforce by 10% then corporate taxes need to go up by the lost tax revenue.
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And the corporate C-suite should also be reduced by 10%.
As a developer⦠(Score:3)
the last 2 jobs (Score:2)
AI is not going to eliminate work (Score:3)
The amount of work for humans to do expands to fill the capacity. The nature of work changes, but there will always be useful things people can do and someone who will pay them to do it.
The real problem with AI is power and control and the inequity in the distribution of benefits. This is not unlike the industrial revolution where increased productivity initially benefited only a few people. The assumptions of the techno sociopaths that human experience is all about production of goods and services that benefit only them is not true. The benefits will have to be shared. And once shared, they will be traded for things done by humans.
Old hat (Score:1)
Clippy wrote most my rejection notices 30 years ago.
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That comment has the intellectual depth of a dime. AI doesn't give flying rats ass whether you are on premises or WH. It is the nature of the job that determines whether AI can do it.
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I keep thinking of The Jetsons... George just turns on the computer every day and talks to the computer while it makes all decisions and does all the actual work--- he mostly does office politics all day. It's satirical but generally nails the problem. The bits the AI can't do is all that will be left over which is less and less stuff. To feel in charge; like they are doing something, and not depressed (but mostly because it provides something for characters to do) they tell the machines WHEN to do the wo
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"If you work remote, you can be replaced by AI eventually."
I guess, if you define "eventually" as "whenever that happens".
In that statement, you can also replace the "if you work remotely" with "if you work", so I'm not entirely sure of your point.
Does remote work by it's very nature somehow render it more compatible with AI? That seems to be what you are saying, and I would disagree wholeheartedly.
That seems like a stupid idea. Remote work comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and has all the complexity