Will Big Tech Layoffs Bring a Culture Shift to Anxiety and Job Insecurity? (seattletimes.com) 240
Tech industry layoffs may be worse at large tech companies than the rest of the IT industry. The New York Times argues those layoffs have now shifted the culture at Big Tech companies, after interviewing more than two dozen of their workers. "Cooperation and collegiality are on the wane; chumminess between employees and managers has cooled as mutual suspicion pervades their relationships; and a throbbing economic anxiety infects almost every conversation.
"Perhaps no site on the internet reflects this transformation more vividly than Blind, where users can post in private channels restricted to employees of a single company, or public channels visible to anyone..." Since 2022, large tech companies have collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers, unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability. The threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence has loomed over those who remain. This year alone, Amazon has indicated that it is laying off more than 15,000 workers, Block 4,000, Meta 8,000 and Oracle an estimated 30,000... By most measures, the sentiments that Blind tracks have taken a turn for the worse. During the nearly four years before tech companies began major layoffs in the fall of 2022, Meta and Microsoft employees posted about career success — topics like how to maximize their salary or win promotions — more than four times as often as they posted about job insecurity, according to Blind. Since then, the ratios have lurched in the opposite direction: Meta and Microsoft employees have posted about job insecurity roughly 1.5 times as often as they post about success...
The shift has had practical effects. A Meta employee said in an interview that some workers on her team now used less vacation time and that, in a break with custom, people frequently checked on their projects while on vacation. They increasingly worry about getting a poor performance review or losing their job if they aren't constantly available. The employee, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, said she and many of her colleagues frequently checked Blind because it could be comforting to see how many other Meta workers shared their anxieties. Employees at several companies said in interviews that their morale was further undermined by the feeling that the layoffs were abrupt and arbitrary, and executed with little empathy.
Several tech workers said it was the scarcity of information about possible layoffs that raised their cortisol levels and made it difficult to focus on their jobs. They often fill the vacuum by turning to Blind, which, in addition to posts by workers, features a "tech layoff tracker" that lists both layoff rumors and those it has confirmed. "I was on Blind five days a week," said Faith Wilkins El, a software engineer who was laid off from Oracle in late March, after more than four years at the company. Wilkins El, who is part of the Oracle Workers Collective, a group seeking better severance agreements with the company, said navigating Blind was sometimes stressful because it was hard to know what was true or false. (Blind says it has a security team to weed out bad actors, like those who may try to register under fake email addresses.) Still, she found it more helpful than not because the layoffs came as less of a shock after she spent time on the site. "I was trying to get prepared mentally," she said.
Blind is capitalizing on the increased interest with new products. It plans to unveil a service called Blind AI, which will allow employers to simulate their workers' reactions to certain changes, like a stricter in-office mandate. And it is close to releasing a feature to alert users that layoffs are imminent.
"Perhaps no site on the internet reflects this transformation more vividly than Blind, where users can post in private channels restricted to employees of a single company, or public channels visible to anyone..." Since 2022, large tech companies have collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers, unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability. The threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence has loomed over those who remain. This year alone, Amazon has indicated that it is laying off more than 15,000 workers, Block 4,000, Meta 8,000 and Oracle an estimated 30,000... By most measures, the sentiments that Blind tracks have taken a turn for the worse. During the nearly four years before tech companies began major layoffs in the fall of 2022, Meta and Microsoft employees posted about career success — topics like how to maximize their salary or win promotions — more than four times as often as they posted about job insecurity, according to Blind. Since then, the ratios have lurched in the opposite direction: Meta and Microsoft employees have posted about job insecurity roughly 1.5 times as often as they post about success...
The shift has had practical effects. A Meta employee said in an interview that some workers on her team now used less vacation time and that, in a break with custom, people frequently checked on their projects while on vacation. They increasingly worry about getting a poor performance review or losing their job if they aren't constantly available. The employee, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, said she and many of her colleagues frequently checked Blind because it could be comforting to see how many other Meta workers shared their anxieties. Employees at several companies said in interviews that their morale was further undermined by the feeling that the layoffs were abrupt and arbitrary, and executed with little empathy.
Several tech workers said it was the scarcity of information about possible layoffs that raised their cortisol levels and made it difficult to focus on their jobs. They often fill the vacuum by turning to Blind, which, in addition to posts by workers, features a "tech layoff tracker" that lists both layoff rumors and those it has confirmed. "I was on Blind five days a week," said Faith Wilkins El, a software engineer who was laid off from Oracle in late March, after more than four years at the company. Wilkins El, who is part of the Oracle Workers Collective, a group seeking better severance agreements with the company, said navigating Blind was sometimes stressful because it was hard to know what was true or false. (Blind says it has a security team to weed out bad actors, like those who may try to register under fake email addresses.) Still, she found it more helpful than not because the layoffs came as less of a shock after she spent time on the site. "I was trying to get prepared mentally," she said.
Blind is capitalizing on the increased interest with new products. It plans to unveil a service called Blind AI, which will allow employers to simulate their workers' reactions to certain changes, like a stricter in-office mandate. And it is close to releasing a feature to alert users that layoffs are imminent.
perceived (Score:5, Insightful)
unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability.
"Perceived" being the key word there. It's not as much of a shock to those of us who've been around longer, seeing various upturns and downturns.
And yes, the tools are changing. Learn to use the new tools, alongside your old ones.
Re:perceived (Score:5, Insightful)
A "tool" that lets one programmer do the work of 20 means that 19 will be laid off, regardless of how well they learn the tools. To say nothing of people working in other industries "disrupted" by those tools who will be laid off no matter what they do.
Re: perceived (Score:5, Interesting)
Until it's discovered that the tool becomes stale and obsolete in a few years because ir can't fulfill new requirements.
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That's a problem for a few years from now. Those in charge don't think in terms of years.
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That ratio is *way* more optimistic than anything I've seen demonstrated. Sure, AI can generate code 20 times faster than a human. But then when you have to undo or redo 80% of what it does because it got it wrong, or produced inefficient or insecure code, that 1:20 ratio starts to shrink. At best, what I've seen despite desperate attempts to make AI do everything at my company, is a 10-20% increase in productivity.
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When you're on the ride of a sigmoid curve, you never know where you are. How many times has Moore's Law died now?
Re: perceived (Score:3)
Bad example. Five minutes of Hollywood action movie is already a one sentence prompt. Hero drives vehicle in improbable physics-defying way through gridlocked traffic whilst bad guys shoot ineffectually near him using increasingly powerful military weapons.
Re: perceived (Score:5, Interesting)
You clearly haven't used AI for complex tasks.
My company thinks AI can be used to single-handedly implement Jira tickets.
On the first attempt, Claude Code spit out a bunch of stuff, built a screen and some APIs, and when the developer ran the code, the screen did nothing. After only a week of dozens of revisions, he got it to work.
So then he went to ticket #2, to implement a simple API. Claude spit out 14,000 lines of code, modifying 5 components that had nothing to do with the request.
Each AI run took from half an hour, to hours, not just 3 minutes.
Your teenager might need hand-holding, but not to that extent. If they did, you should find a different job for the teenager. And for the AI.
AI is good at being spoon-fed coding tasks by a developer. It's not good for wholesale changes, not even close.
Re: perceived (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, so it's the dumb human's fault! Got it!
Re: perceived (Score:2)
I think a tool that lets one person do the work of 20 will result in 17 people being laid off, as the company triples its rate of work. (I can see triple being feasible and achievable in the software industry, but maybe not more)
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A "tool" that lets one programmer do the work of 20 means that 19 will be laid off, regardless of how well they learn the tools. To say nothing of people working in other industries "disrupted" by those tools who will be laid off no matter what they do.
Such is the nature of tools all throughout history. This may be new to you, but it not new at all.
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AI is being used as a convenient scapegoat. If a few big tech companies do layoffs, more do because it's a case of monkey see, monkey do [linkedin.com].
Re:perceived (Score:5, Interesting)
The tool doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your scenario is eliminating too many relevant variables.
For example, most software development companies are in competition against each other AND have more features they want to develop than they have time to develop. They must constantly choose which features/bugfixes to skip in order to make room for the most important ones, and they must choose wisely in order to maintain their competitive position.
So when the tool suddenly increases the productivity of their employees, they don't necessarily cut staff to get back down to where they were. They can now complete more of the work they want, without hiring new people. That's a total win that doesn't involve any job loss at all.
Furthermore, when companies DO cut down to get back to their prior level of productivity, their competitors (who didn't cut staff) now run circles around them, and they must re-hire in order to catch up.
Of course, the scenarios I just gave ALSO glance over many relevant variables. Nothing that happens on the economic stage is this "pure." There are far too many inter-permeating effects. But my point is that you are seeing only one tiny little possibility among many, with real incentives that prevent yours from being the only story.
We get headlines listing layoffs all the time, in part because such headlines are marketing signals and help drive stock prices up. We don't get headlines about the hiring that is also happening. There is constant churn going on, so the numbers we see are skewed and our perception of the economic consequences is equally skewed.
So, things might not be as bad as they seem when you focus ONLY on the reported layoffs and ONLY on the "lay off staff and stay the same" possibility that AI presents businesses. The big picture is, simply put, bigger than that.
Re: perceived (Score:2)
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Conversely the laid off person can now spin up a company of one with 19 agents so they too can take a piece of the pie. Slowly eroding the original company. Why pay a large bloated company for 10 tools when you are only interested in 1 feature. This of course all rests on the hope that said AI tech isn't swapped out on the distributors side for conservation of resources. What should be built today are tools and systems that aren't 100% reliant on AI and only supplemental. I.E. the same way you hire a contra
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Traditional economics would say that tool improves worker productivity and will increase wages, or increase demand for workers at the same wage - though the jobs may shift some. The place where AI is a problem is not when it replaces 19/20 jobs but when it replaces 20/20 jobs. That would make it unlike any other innovation.
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That would make it unlike any other innovation.
The car did that to the horse. Now, horses are just expensive pets for the most part. Very few are "working" anymore.
False - Only if they like last year's revenue (Score:4, Funny)
A "tool" that lets one programmer do the work of 20 means that 19 will be laid off, regardless of how well they learn the tools. To say nothing of people working in other industries "disrupted" by those tools who will be laid off no matter what they do.
Your theory is only valid if they want to do last year's output and 1/20th of the cost. In nearly all historical examples of productivity gains, unless they were hiring large masses of the mindless, the productivity gains were used increase output more than cut costs. As many have pointed out, this is AI-washing. They were already going to lay off these employees.
Why would Oracle lay everyone off vs use these tools to overwhelm and crush all their competitors? Is there really no room to expand? No new projects to try? Are all these tech companies happy with last year's revenue and have they saturated their markets? Their investors are HAPPY with market stagnation at lower costs? NO!!!! That's not how publicly traded companies work. They want growth growth growth until there is no more to be had.
AI is a complex topic. It definitely boosts some productivity, but far less than advertised. It will cause job loss, but far less than feared. Most of the hype is bullshit, but there's real substance as well. Some of the layoffs were AI related...but most were just CEOs using it as an excuse to hide economic headwinds and their mistakes.
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And yes, the tools are changing. Learn to use the new tools, alongside your old ones.
Make sure to stay good with the old tools. With the abysmally bad business numbers that the "new" tools have almost 4 years (!) in, they will not be around much longer. They would have to increase profits 10x (with constant cost) to even break even now and that is not going to happen.
We can expect to have small, specialist LLMs around in the future, but nowhere near with the power (and the problems, hopefully) of current mainstream LLMs. But that is is. Essentially better search, better autocomplete, but no
Betteridge's Law Is Finally Wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Betteridge's Law Is Still Right (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer is no, because anxiety and job insecurity is not a Culture Shift, it's already our culture.
Re:Betteridge's Law Is Still Right (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct. The rest of the economy has been in this state for decades.
Choose (Score:2)
Decide:
1) Use new product/service to replace in-house labor because of the promise of gains from a more optimized alternative with a possible economy of scale that would be difficult or too time consuming to do. Pretend it's long term and predictably stable.
2) Augment existing labor with new product/service to amplify and increase productivity... lower prices, increase output, or at least keep up with the competition with the promise of survival or growth.
Those who pick #2 end up with more gains than those
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Betteridge's Law is not actually a law. It is a corollary to Sturgeons Law, which says "Ninety percent of everything is crap".
UBI was proposed in 1968 (Score:5, Interesting)
read the whole thing here in Playboy of all places: https://galacticjourney.org/st... [galacticjourney.org]
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Actually, Playboy seems appropriate here, since that magazine deals in fantasy.
The first fantasy of the fantasy is that computers / AI will put humans out of work. We've been automating human jobs for centuries, and we've put whole industries out of business in the process. And yet, unemployment remains as low as it's ever been. Yes, AI will put certain categories of people "out of work." But new categories of work will emerge, just as has happened in every past wave of automation. Some people will struggle
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Yes, AI can be scary. But like all other past automations, it isn't going to end civilization as we know it.
"Ending civilization" is a moving goalpost. No, AI won't be The Black Death, nuclear war, or a gamma ray burst. Job loss (and everything that comes with it) is its own kind of devastation, especially when entire communities are impacted.
Sure, it's possible that a fraction of the jobs lost are replaced by "AI managers" or something similar. But massive knowledge worker unemployment will absolutely devastate the economy, and become a destabilizing factor.
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"Ending civilization" is hyperbole, meant to make the point that it's not as awful as the alarmists make it out to be.
You are overestimating the speed and extent to which the unemployment will occur, and underestimating the ability of humans to come up with new things to do. Those new jobs won't just be "AI Manager." Think about the millions of farm jobs lost in the US over the last 100 years. Back then, 70% of people were farmers, today, just 3%. Did all those people get jobs as "combine drivers"? No. They
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So, even though AI has replaced everyone under the C-suite crew at basically every company (including where it's AI-controlled robots with machine vision and machine learning)... Ford, Amazon warehouses, mail order catalog companies, convenience stores, movie making, music making, construction, plumbing, electricians, child care, schools, libraries, pizza outfits, fast food joints, all of farming, medical and surgery, maintenance at the AI data centers (did I forget any)... what exactly are we going to repl
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You must be an executive, because you seem to think it will be "easy" to automate all the jobs you listed. That's what executives always think, is that things are "easy" and "quick" and they get grumpy when it turns out to be difficult and slow.
You are *imagining* that robots and AI can replace all the jobs in the categories you listed. Why haven't they already done so? I mean, the technology to fully automate a fast food restaurant has existed for a long time. Why do we still hire teenagers to work in fast
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You don't have to be an executive to know what's coming.
Because they didn't have the AI and crap they do today.
So, it's hard to write a program that works across all franchisee locations of McD, given different layouts (even if it's only slightly) (which, I assume was the issue when they tried it in the past). Now that you can tie the robot to AI for the program side, and bolt on machine vision (so it can find the "grill" and not murder a person walking past), and the AI can scan the area and learn it's wo
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You kind of got the executive thing backwards. You have to *be* an executive to think it's that easy.
If you think making burgers is so doable by a robot, go get yourself a franchise and make it happen. Go ahead, why not? I mean, you want to be on the side of history that still has an income, right? Sell your house and make it happen! Otherwise you'll lose your house and everything, right?
Oh wait, it's too expensive? Did I hear you say that? Well of course it's too expensive! That's exactly why automation ta
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Well, that might be because I'm not an executive.
I'm the lowly blue-collar worker who worked in a factory and has done drywall and all that hard labor stuff.
When I was at the factory, I would frequently work with the techs to edit the programming on the robots to make sure it would work right... that was 2010 (well before today's AI).
Must be nice to have a house. Must be nice to have the money to open the franchise.
So, are you embracing the side that doesn't have an income (I assume so, because of your com
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Good, you do understand the complexities of good work. I do drywall too, as a handyman, and I know that it's not easy to get a good, smooth finish. I'm pretty sure the robots aren't coming for your drywall job any time soon.
Sorry about assuming you owned a house. That would make it difficult to open a franchise, not having any assets. Or even if you did, it would still be impossibly expensive to open a franchise selling automatically-cooked burgers. That's been done too. There is actually a burger joint whe
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A BK or McD's doesn't make the burgers themselves, and doesn't even fully-cook them per order. And, in the future, no place will... more expensive and time consuming to do it that way.
Either of those approach things like a car assembly line... there isn't a person chopping the salad, there isn't a person skinning taters and pressing them through the cutter, there isn't a person par-cooking the burgers constantly just to get them ready for reheating.
The burgers arrive in bags, same as the salad and fries...
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I now and then do drywall, have helped with electrical, plumbing (just as an Independent Contractor).
I also worked 2 years helping build a non-profit publicly-available science lab (Chris Boden's 'The Geek Group'), where all of the above was done without anyone licensed to do it (and it passed inspection, with expensive Scotch changing hands).
Difficulty opening a place isn't having a house to borrow against... it's having an idea that's worth it (potentially bankrupting yourself just to open a pizza joint t
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Interesting articles, and some pretty cools stuff!
An important note about the drywall robot...it can't handle literal edge cases: either inside or outside corners. So like most automation, it handles the easy stuff, and leaves the hard stuff for humans.
The prefab homes looks impressive, but it is a startup, so promises are huge, delivery might not be so great. It's a little hard to get through the fluff to determine how many homes can actually be built by this company. The best numbers I could find point to
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For now... how about 6 months or a year from now... given the up-tick in AI power, it's not far-fetched to think that a robot can slap up a corner bead, and do a bit of sanding.
The robot-built houses would put off all construction people... work with an architect to design house, architect sends design to factory and it starts building the house in sections, and so on. The wall sections could connect electrical like the old knife switches did, and a little redesign could have plumbing work the same way.
Rot
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AI can't slap on corner beads, the robot would need additional physical capabilities for that. It literally just has a spray gun and a spinning sanding disc. AI can't manufacture additional tools to put on that corner. That's a whole different level of operation.
If the automation can't fulfill all aspects of the job it's handed, the job is gonna be tweaked to make sure that the automation handles it, no problem.
But that's just it, it *is* a problem. As we programmers know, 80% of the functionality is achieved with 20% of the work. It's that last 20% that requires 80% of the work. It *seems* so close you can touch it (full automation), but in real life that
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It has a box of corner beads (y'know how you get them from Home Depot, and a helper bot to bring a stack of them), and the tool to roll them down as an attachment. Figure a robot (of some design), an arm to do finishing, it can swap tools on the end effector to a thing to grab the corner bead, put it in place, swap tools to the roller, give it a few rolling passes, swap tools to a scrapper that has a vacuum thing to suck up the excess mud for re-use.
Is there a reason it can't be done using today's tech?
Whe
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They do have a self contained burger maker now.
https://new.abb.com/news/detai... [abb.com]
I'm going to imagine maybe the cost is a tad high for the investment at this point but it's coming. Especially if they push minimum wage up much higher. That's part of the calculus, after all.
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Yep, I shared that same story in a different thread today.
So, why is there only one? If it were so cost-effective to make burgers with a robot, the concept should be spreading like wildfire.
But it's not. Automation, including this automation, is really, really expensive. For most jobs, humans cost less. And this will remain true, as it always has, including AI automation.
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(Oh, and I'm not an executive, never have been at any point. I'm just a realist, and can see how corporations are going to f*** over the little people (the other 99.999999999999999%. Me and you aren't worth anything to Amazon unless we're buying stuff. The guy stocking shelves can easily be replaced by a rolling robot, and me and you are disposable/expendible meat-sacks)
Ride this wave? What wave... useful hint: it's not a wave, it's more like a rapidly growing tsunami (think the wave the aliens made in
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That shelf-stocking thing...it's been done, by Walmart. They gave up after 5 years. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/w... [cbsnews.com] Now why would that be?
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While I completely agree with your take on AI slop, I'm not so sure past revolutions didn't suffer from the same kind of slop. Even the humble farm windmill (which automated pumping water from the ground) went through many innovations before they became the boring, predictable machines they are today. For example, early models tore themselves up in a strong windstorm. Later models handled this edge case by automatically turning the blades sideways in a strong wind.
And yes, absolutely right to your last stat
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If money becomes "free" it will become worthless. And there isn't enough wealth of all the billionaires in the world, to fund UBI.
This betrays some really entry-level thinking about money, where you're believing what it says on the back of the software box. (Remember those?) The idea of trickle down economics was that the wealthy were supposed to spend and/or invest their money so that it went back into circulation. That's what happens when normal people get it. It gets spent about five times before it winds up in some rich person's pocket. When rich people get money, it only gets spent twice or so before they put it someplace where i
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When rich people get money, it only gets spent twice or so before they put it someplace where it's not employing anyone.
What kind of place would that be, exactly?
If a rich person collects art, they have to keep it stored in a place suitable for art (a place which has to be built and maintained by workers), they have to preserve the art itself (also employing workers).
If a rich person collects cars, again, they have to build a place to store the cars, and maintain them, again employing workers.
And that's just the truly excess money. A whole lot of their money goes to the enjoyment of life. You know, like fancy vacations, yach
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Where is Bezos' trillions stashed? His mattress? It's all off-shored as a tax evasion tactic.
I just thought of something... how much money have American's stashed off-shore that is unclaimed because the stasher died?
Put that 'unclaimed money' towards UBI.
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I'm glad you picked Bezos, it's a great illustration, and his assets are well known. https://finance.yahoo.com/news... [yahoo.com]
- 95% of Bezos's money is held as a 10% of Amazon.com, equates to 158,000 of Amazon's 1.58 million employees
- His Blue Origin company employs about 10,000 people.
- The Washington Post employs about 2,000 people.
So just those three companies, which account for nearly all of his money, employs 170,000 people. That's not exactly hiding his money under a mattress.
OK, so let's talk about offshore
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Why, only the billionaires? How about the trillionaires?
And, why, pray tell, would that be a one time payment? Especially if it was a one-time payment, I'm fairly sure that they would make some amount of money again.
10% of Amazon is still a good chunk of change.
Remember, AI-controlled robots taking jobs (for the physical jobs) and AI taking the office jobs, and whoever owns those companies making money (people need new iPhones, don't they?) could keep the country (maybe the world) going.
If rent was knocke
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There are no trillionaires.
The point about the one-time payment is, if you took *ALL* their money, and redistributed it, they would have no more money to give away, they wouldn't have it any more. That's why it's one time. And it's worse than that. All that money, isn't cash, it's assets. You can't just take Amazon and give it as cash as UBI. You have to sell it to actual buyers first.
But it's all make-believe anyway. There is no world in which all the billionaires will allow all their money to be redistrib
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Who said anything about the billionaires (we should be talking about trillionaires) _allowing_ their money to be redistributed? Do they need it to survive? No! Does their company need the little people to buy stuff to survive? Yes!
So, force them to sell the excess assets and fund UBI.
Oh, yeah... move to the desert where having a well is a rarity (I know, I lived with a former friend and her husband/owner in Texas).
I've heard that argument before a million times... "why don't you just do it?"
Not everyone
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Well, might have to have a rethink of the current pricing of the important stuff.
Or, on the flipside, the trillionaires let us go homeless and starve in the streets. At which point, they realize that there's nobody left and they wonder who's going to tend the cattle so they can have their thrice-daily $1000 T-Bone.
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But new categories of work will emerge, just as has happened in every past wave of automation.
Certainly new categories of work will emerge. The question is, will hiring and paying human beings be the most economically efficient way to fill those new positions, or will those jobs be done by AIs instead?
Previous waves of automation allowed people to move "up the food chain" and do jobs the machines still couldn't do, which was fine (at least, for the people capable of doing the new jobs), but if we get to the stage where there aren't many jobs left that the machines can't do, then we're out of luck -
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Why would you think there won't be jobs AI "can't do"? Have you used AI lately? It can do little stuff nicely. But when you throw something complex at it, you have to hand-hold it and give it many follow-up prompts. This is no different than any other type of automation ever.
People who use words like "overlords" give away their fantasy-world thought process. This happens in books and video games, but not in real life.
As for the billionaires, it doesn't matter if they want to share or not, there's not enough
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Why would you think there won't be jobs AI "can't do"? Have you used AI lately? It can do little stuff nicely. But when you throw something complex at it, you have to hand-hold it and give it many follow-up prompts. This is no different than any other type of automation ever.
There will be jobs that AI can't do. How many? Enough to keep 5-10 billion humans employed? What makes you so sure there will be?
Clearly AI has progressed considerably over the last 5-10 years. It's anyone's guess how much further it will progress -- maybe it'll plateau right where it is now, or maybe it will keep becoming more powerful as better algorithms are discovered. I'm not qualified to predict that, and neither are you, but the AI people certainly seem bullish about it.
You actually think money actually "just appears"?
Sorry, I thought you wou
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There will be jobs that AI can't do. How many? Enough to keep 5-10 billion humans employed? What makes you so sure there will be?
Yes, absolutely. What makes me think so? History. In all the history of inventions of automation technology, and there have been whole industries wiped out along the way, people still manage to stay employed. There is nothing to suggest that this will ever change.
When considering what is likely to happen in the future, history is always a better guide, than doomsday hand-wavey prognostications.
That pocket computer, is the culmination of 80 years of intense research and development of computer technology. I
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You would have to preface that with "today's AI, as it stands based on today's build"... the build next month might be able to do computer vision 1,000X better or be able to fluidly speak Sumerian or anything.
The trillionaires _are_ the overlords. If they just shutdown Amazon, Meta, eBay, Target and Wal-Mart,
If they just decided on a whim to shut down all their companies, how do you think society would handle that?
If, perhaps, the prices for housing and food and the needed stuff dropped to 80's levels, I'm
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I don't think they'll be called jobs but rather things you "get" to do because you don't want to sit around on UBI all day. Some of the coolest things I'll never get to do in this world happen at work places that have specialized people doing specialized stuff. Even not so special stuff but I'm busy over here while that other stuff is happening over there. We call that opportunity cost, by the way.
You won't even get paid to do these things but just getting the chance to participate will be why you are doing
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You can see how this would work, just by going to your nearest inner city neighborhood. It's a place where people get money from the government, many for doing no work. What you'll see, is people just sitting around all day. You will not see people being productive out of the goodness of their hearts, or the joy of being creative. That's not how actual human nature works. Actual humans need a motivation to work, and that comes mostly in the form of employment for money.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, if they get enough money to live on (there's a difference between 'live on' and 'survive on'), that pays for everything (including alcohol and drugs), of course they sit around all day... if all they get is enough to pay rent and utilities and food, leaving $50 or something, that'd be enough to push them to find something to do.
Not everyone lives in an Inner City (I assume you mean like Ghetto Chicago or Detroit)... I live in downtown St. Cloud (70,000 or so), and plenty of people live where it's even
Re: (Score:2)
No, you're not a realist, you're a pessimist. A LOT has to go very, very wrong, to get to the point where we can't make a living any more.
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Being a pessimist is the same as a realist in this case... what positive comes out of firing every employee and replacing them with AI bots?
Show me a positive outcome from replacing all workers with AI bots (not gonna get into the definitions).
While a pessimist worries about the negatives (which are tons, if you consider the AI bots as negatives).
As it is progressing, how is AI benefitting the people whose jobs are being lost?
Re: (Score:2)
This is what makes you a pessimist and not a realist:
what positive comes out of firing every employee and replacing them with AI bots?
This is not even a remote possibility. A realist would understand that the scale of the AI bot replacement, is not nearly as huge as people imagine. Unemployment in tech is still below 4%! That's a fantastically good rate!
As it is progressing, how is AI benefitting the people whose jobs are being lost?
Two things. First, very few jobs have been lost, see above. Second, the jobs AI takes, nobody actually wants, just like nobody wants to be a customer service center call taker, nobody wants to be a toothpaste-tube-cap-screwer, and so on.
Re:UBI was proposed in 1968 (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes but they shouldn't (Score:5, Insightful)
This same shit has been going on all along and some people are just now discovering it. Even the scale isn't really different. We're in a very specific tech bubble, so very specific sectors are hiring, and the others are firing as the air is sucked out of the room. When the bubble collapses, the sector which has done the crazy hiring will have mass layoffs, and the other sectors will hire again.
The truth is that no one in tech should ever feel secure, because some new development which can just be highly marketable bullshit can come along and fuck up all of the markets because nobody has to come up with a sustainable good idea to get rich any more because of the nature of the stock market. It's a game for rich people played with our money as the counters and they give zero fucks about the impact to anyone but themselves. That was always true, but as the stock market has become ever more divorced from reality, it does more damage to people who still have to live there, i.e. those of us who work for a living.
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which can just be highly marketable bullshit
That describes LLM-type AI very nicely. To a lesser degree, it did also describes the 5GL project (which aimed to replace programmers some 40 years ago and which had just resoundingly failed when I studied CS) and most other AI hypes. This one will not be different. Yes, something useful always comes out, but maybe 5% of what gets promised and sold.
No field is "recession proof" (Score:2)
and radio ads that claim such should be sued to Pluto.
There was a tech slump around 1983 due to the video game crash, and again in 1992 due to mass "Glasnost" aerospace layoffs. There probably would have been one around 2009, but mobile devices were booming, taking up the slack.
Save up, the "business cycle" ain't going away.
programmers are funny (Score:2)
Re:programmers are funny (Score:4, Insightful)
Programmers have been automating their own work since...programming began. Each new generation of programming languages has cut the amount of time required to build software, by orders of magnitude. First there was raw machine code, then assembly languages, then 3rd generation languages like C and C++, then development frameworks, and now AI. Each past automation cycle has increased, not decreased, the need for programmers. AI, like VB, will enable a lot of people who don't know what they're doing, to create software. And like the old VB stuff, it will be crap. It will still take real programmers with talent, to make real software that works.
Re: (Score:2)
Programmers are not going away. But the next AI Winter is going to be an ice-age after the incredible crap they pulled this time.
Slashdot: "Panic !" Also Slashdot: "Don't Panic !" (Score:2, Informative)
https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/05/23/064223/us-layoffs-havent-increased-and-new-tech-industry-hiring-balances-firings
It was two days ago, I guess.
Re:Slashdot: "Panic !" Also Slashdot: "Don't Panic (Score:5, Informative)
The referenced Washington Post article is based on US government statistics, and if you believe those statistics, I have a bridge to sell you. The
Civil servants have been fired for delivering "bad" numbers. You think the remaining staffers are going to look for things that might make the numbers look bad?
One more thing this administration has corrupted: economic statistics.
Re: Slashdot: "Panic !" Also Slashdot: "Don't Pani (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The referenced Washington Post article is based on US government statistics, and if you believe those statistics, I have a bridge to sell you
Certainly it's hard to know whose stats to believe. But just automatically/angrily dismissing official agency statistics as MAGA-fake-news is just as dangerous as the *Rump admin's attempts at political meddling and labeling everything they disagree with as fake news. It lets them win at the more important game of destroying all confidence in institutions.and sources of truth.
Instead the better approach is to track down trustworthy sources to refute those statistics, if they indeed have been biased. Publi
Pariah (Score:2)
So now the narrative is blame immigrants for taking your jobs, while the AI takes it.
Re: (Score:2)
I think that it's more like blaming AI for taking your tech job, and then giving it to outsourced foreign labor if/when that doesn't work out.
You can partly blame COVID for this, as we showed that 90% of IT can be done fully remote. Frankly, I'm surprised that it took the IT managers so long to realize that work being done from a living room in Omaha or Boise can done cheaper in Odessa or Bangalore.
Anxiety and job insecurity are already here (Score:2)
It's not easy right now for tech workers trying to find work.
Alternative tech support (Score:2)
I'm fine. I plan to switch to self-employment and provide artisinal technical support, perhaps via OnlyFans.
Sure, maybe I'll have to prominently display my bare feet or hawk used headsets to my clients, but it's a small inconvenience.
Time to revive fuckedcompany.com? (Score:3)
Blind (Score:2)
Sounds interesting. A series of social media boards, oriented around each companies culture. Either private, for inside discussions. Or open to the public. So they can learn a bit about the organization.
I used to work for an outfit that had an internal Usenet server. With some private discussion groups (restricted to employees) in addition to the worldwide Usenet (somewhat filtered of the NSFW stuff). It was like a giant rumor network around a virtual company water cooler. Some managers hated it. But many
Re: Blind (Score:2)
Re: Blind (and blind dismissal) (Score:2)
Exactly my point earlier.
It reads just like (and has the effect of) a promo with a troll hook. And the hook is certainly generating plenty of engagement.
Re: (Score:2)
PR flack piece paid for by Blind
Perhaps.
But they need to ask for their money back. No link to their web site included.
From Trust to Intellectual Terrorism. (Score:2)
"Cooperation and collegiality are on the wane; chumminess between employees and managers has cooled as mutual suspicion pervades their relationships.."
That was not caused by unemployment or economic instability. That, was caused by social media infecting every part of our mental society at every age. Trust. Honor. Integrity. Honesty. These concepts are not born. They are taught. Embedded in us since childbirth. And clearly are defined delineators in criminal statistics between those who carried those values into adulthood, and those who did not.
Today, social media doesn't just sell the concept of normalizing narcissism, filtermaxxing everything,
Blind leading the blind leading the blind (Score:3)
Blind is capitalizing on the increased interest with new products. It plans to unveil a service called Blind AI, which will allow employers to simulate their workers' reactions to certain changes, like a stricter in-office mandate. And it is close to releasing a feature to alert users that layoffs are imminent.
So, workers don't know what management is doing. Management doesn't know what workers are thinking. And a company named Blind of all things is going to help with that? Please tell me they have internal (or heck, external) marketing presentations titled "Blind Is Leading The Blind Leading The Blind"...
(Or is their internal leadership oblivious to this opportunity for marketing excellence? In that case, maybe the blind are leading Blind leading the blind leading the blind... It's turtles all the way down...)
Isn't that the point? (Score:2)
Welcome to the age of precarity (Score:2)
Predictions for 80% of the working population in the next decade:
1. Work for most people will not be with the same employer over the long term.
2. Most jobs will be like day labor in construction.
3. Employers will rate employees and share ratings with other employers in a confidential database which the employee has no access to. (California labor code section 1050 will be repealed, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act will be severely gutted)
4. There will be a large proportion of workers who will be deemed une
Re: (Score:2)
I think nothing like that will happen. More likely
1. General LLMs will go away because they never reached profitability.
2. Some big names in IT will vanish or become irrelevant because they fired to many people and lost too much institutional knowledge.
3. Those that made sure they have real skills will have no trouble finding good employment. But they will remember who sacked too many people before, see 2.
4. But something will need to be done about the mid and lower skilled. "Work" as wealth distributor wil
AI consultant vs Human (Score:2)
I wonder if an AI Oracle consultant could output anything worse than what I have seen from the current crowd of live Oracultists?
dehumanizing (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The opposite may be the case: They cannot function anymore. They may even have committed suicide. But giants die slowly, so it may take some time to become obvious and then some more to happen.
Doesn't the US already have that? (Score:2)
The thing is, US people live significantly shorter lives than Europeans. Apparently rich (!) US people live shorter than poor Europeans, so it is not healthcare affordability. One article I read claims it is stress. And at-will employment will create a lot of stress.
Workers need to establish solidarity (Score:3)
Re: I think Elon Musk summarized it ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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As usual Elon is full of crap.
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Startups are generally crap. Only a small number ever becomes profitable. Employment conditions are bad. Payment is bad.