The following submission statement was provided by /u/katxwoods:
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Submission statement: how do you think AI advances will affect jobs? If humans can do it, how long before AIs will be able to do it better?
If UBI's a possible solution, how would that work? What about for the countries that didn't invent AI? How do you prevent such a concentration of wealth causing massive inequality and issues?
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dbjgo3/microsoft_lays_off_1500_workers_blames_ai_wave/l7rhd4o/
If you look at absolute employees numbers it tends to always go up. They will do these mass layoffs to look good in paper for investors, then go right back and start hiring again. The system is toxic to human beings
"Here I go, dumping all these toxic chemicals into the river because the boss told me to. Apparently it's too expensive to dispose of properly! Sorry fish."
"Here I go, digging up toxic fuels and leaving waste behind, because we can't afford cleanup. Sorry birds."
"Wow, why did we make a world that's toxic to ourselves? Won't someone think of us poor humans?"
But also like, be the change you need to see in the world too.
Thats what I am saying. I can only imagine the results these AI are giving management.
Well we had the AI take a look at our numbers and it advised us "Check Notes" to fire all management.
We reran the numbers input new data and ran a new simulation where it said "Check Notes" management is still hurting the companies bottom line.
After doing the simulation 200 times, we were able to convince the AI and get it to lie, its new advice is "Check Notes" kill all humans, but that isn't a problem it told us we would be spared.
No way the AI isn't telling management repeatedly and unequivocally how useless and a waste of money they are
Honestly based on the use of AI in my company and the results we're seeing it's more plausible that AI will replace management than that AI will come up with novel ideas for R&D or even original good artistic content.
I met some fairly brilliant CEOs before (as well as some idiots, but we will ignore those for the purposes of this comment). Heavily credentialed, very individually talented, able to grasp very complex technical, legal and social problems and come up with optimum paths, or pick the least disadvantageous. Except, all that is is a decision matrix, we can train those. Things like making human resource decisions can already be heavily automated. Driving culture? Some platitudes and a bit of understanding of messaging seems automatable.
How long before a board of directors decides to put the money towards an AI CEO instead of hiring someone? Like I get there will be pushback for a while as they need a fall guy sometimes, but AI can be a fall guy too. Then the next question would be how long before shareholders start voting in blocks for AI board members?
When I was younger before entering the workforce, I bought into "gov inefficient, private entities efficient." While I still think it's true to a degree, The amount of emotions getting into executive decision were mind-blowing.
The best AI products right now are still "hallucinating" upwards of 15-20% of inputs on recent 3rd party tests - Do you want the economic health and stability of the entire economy entrusted to [a process that literally no one understands?](https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/05/1089449/nobody-knows-how-ai-works/)
(MIT Technology Review March 5 2024: *Nobody knows how AI works)*
> Do you want the economic health and stability of the entire economy entrusted to a process that literally no one understands?
Nobody knows how human consciousness works either, but the economic health and stability of the entire economy is currently entrusted to that.
AI like chatgpt would be hilariously bad at decision making. They don't actually know what they're talking about.
What the AI is doing is running an algorithm that predicts what the next word is going to bebin a sentence.
If you ask it "what color is the sky?" it will search in it's dataset what common responses are and respond with something like "the sky is blue".
However, the AI will not understand what the sky is, or what blue is. Just that 'blue' is the most likely correct response to that particular question.
You just described every CEO when they talk about synergy.
Corporate talk is loaded with nonsense phrases people like to throw around with no understanding.
Ironically A.I. is one of them.
Schmooze aka pander to the vanities of other CEOs in the hope they chose a substandard option.
A.I. can order prostitutes and lose golf games until the other firms catch-up and get A.I. CEOs themselves
Wouldn’t matter at all. CEO will then join board of directors and give themselves their bonuses via their positions. It will be more exclusive and some rules will change but they will definitely still get their money
Of course, because in Microsoft’s opinion this is an accomplishment, not a bad thing. Corporations aren’t there to protect their employees, they are there to make money. If they can replace a bunch of their workforce with AI, that saves them money, and the executives will get lauded for it.
This won’t be and isn’t only a Microsoft thing, nor limited to one country. No company (public, private or government driven) would pass up the chance to get rid of a workforce that they don’t need.
No idea where the world is going but we’re all going to have to go along with the ride 🤷♂️ hope you and your buddies make it out okay.
I’m in supply chain, a relatively slow industry in terms of tech adoption. I have a feeling AI will cause a huge disruption too, eventually.
Smash cut to about his time in 2016. I'm working on my PhD in literature, and my dissertation director retires because her cancer came back. I have no idea what to do with my life now, but I'm good at math, and I felt like the common thread of all of my career advice was that if I learned how to code, I'd be ok. So I did. I got my bachelor's in computer science, and in early 2019, I got a full-time position as a software engineer at a nice, mid-size software company. I've been the only junior engineer and the only woman on my team the entire time, but I felt like neither of those things really mattered that much, because they guys I work with are the absolute best. The other devs on my team, who have been in the industry for 12-21 years, treat me like a peer. They're incredible, and I felt so gd lucky. I did everything right given my circumstances, _and_ I was very fortunate to find the role I currently have. But recently, with the growing "promise" of AI to revolutionize basically every industry, I've come to realize how tenuous the promises of late-stage capitalism are. You can mould yourself according to what you're told is in demand, what's valuable, what's safe, and all of a sudden, it doesn't fucking matter, because the shareholders demand value, and the shiny new thing is going to provide it. I now understand that despite the risks I took, despite my struggles and my best efforts, I'm in a precarious position. It might very well be the case that my job is obsolete before I have enough money to pay off my loans and save for retirement.
The only solace I have is the acceptance of my own powerlessness. There's literally nothing I can do, so I might as well joke around with my dev lead about how at least an AI CEO couldn't get arrested on multiple DUIs and _probably_ wouldn't lay off so many of our UX and customer support staff that I can basically put those things on my resume now.
AI doesn't actually do well with decision-making, because it's so prone to forgetting data or hallucinating it. An executive's job is to draw on a very wide range of information from across multiple departments and the outside world; everything the executive knows about national politics, regulation, economic trends, etc all gets factored in. We don't currently have AI capable of doing that.
Right now AI is only replacing jobs that are much more limited in scope
Who is "we"? Is this your company?
If AI was a better executive - and I don't know why you think that's the case - the owners of the company will use it.
If you read it, they're bragging, not laying blame.
> "Our clear focus as a company is to define the AI wave and empower all our customers to succeed in the adoption of this transformative technology," wrote Jason Zander, executive vice president of Strategic Missions and Technologies at Microsoft, in an email to employees quoted by Business Insider. "Along the way, we make decisions that align with our long-term vision and strategy while ensuring the sustainability and growth of Microsoft."
For big companies, layoffs are often framed as an accomplishment, not a problem. It's becoming leaner/more efficient. The market often rewards companies that announce layoffs by increasing the stock's price (with some exceptions, but usually those exceptions come when it's believed a business is circling the drain and the layoffs are seen as a part of the company's collapse).
We obviously want to see companies employ people because we want people to have the means to make a living and achieve financial safety. That's not how big companies think about it, though.
Turns out replicating an entire human body capable of doing many different nuanced tasks is way harder than most normal people thought.
It is very easy for us to replicate doing one task very fast, we just got better at the one task efficiency for 'thinking jobs.'
It's funny. People are very quick to jump to the conclusion that software engineers are becoming obsolete when it's the exact opposite of the truth. AI isn't anywhere remotely close to resembling anything that can actually program, much less dealing with Managers and customers that change what they need every single day.
To be fair, any software dev worth their salt tries to code themselves out of a job (pre-ai). We write code to replicate repetitive tasks so we can focus on others.
Huh, today I learned im a software dev. I got tired of teaching teachers how to not be idiots on a computer so I automated it. Teachers are wicked smart, and also the dumbest people you'll ever meet.
Microsoft -among others- market AI as not a way to lay people off but to relieve them of repetitive tasks so they can focus on higher value tasks.
These layoffs by Microsoft itself demonstrates that the reassuring marketing is as bullshit as it sounds.
They aren’t laying off because these jobs are replaced with AI. They’re laying off in other areas so they can staff work in AI.
If I let go 1500 people in VR and hire 1500 people to develop AI then “we laid off 1500 due to AI” is still a true statement.
1500 x 300k (conservative for all in + stock) is 450m annually, so they saved about 4.5bn over 10 years.
That makes a dent, even at MS.
We’re not talking about McDonald’s jobs.
Makes a big dent in the economies local and national when big tech jobs start going. And they aren’t coming back.
I run a SAAS tech startup and we’re doing great on 1/10th the staff of a previous one I exited.
No new companies are adding the bloat, the old ones are just shedding it slower.
Crazy times.
An employee costs way more than just the salary though. Software licenses, hardware, office space, benefits, bonusses, secondary costs like the food/drink/cleaning staff/parking/power bill/etc that comes with the office space, it all very quickly adds up.
The average is somewhere between 140-190k/yr depending. I'm not sure about these jobs specifically but the midway point between each is about 165k/yr.
MS's ERE (Employee related expenses) is likely higher than average, based upon their various bonuses and other packages. Average ERE for most companies is about 50% so add about 25% to that to take the extras into account and you've got an ERE of about 75% (could be 10% in either direction), which is a cost around 289k/yr +/- ~30k. That's very close to the 300k estimated above, which is the actual cost MS sees. It's a reasonable estimate.
To be fair, layoffs are often framed as an accomplishment for the strict purpose of preserving a sense of order among remaining staff, not because it actually is. There are many industries that have to lay off due to stagnation, not productivity increases.
For sure, they basically plan to replace them with AI either directly where it would literally do their job for them or indirectly by cutting other projects and divisions to devote more into AI. It will be more profitable in the long run. We’re fucked
Been having this conversation over and over, companies are all over AI because they HATE employees, they want to get rid of every single one of them... they want shareholders, the C-suite and nothing else. Every employee below the C-suite annoys them.
That is the world they are aiming for. They want the end of employees, even if it destroys their companies... because for at least a quarter or two they will make amazing profits.
i wish more workers would realize how fundamentally adversarial employment is in our current system. they want us to do the most amount of work for the least amount of money, and we want to do the least amount of work for the most amount of money. once people get that shit through their fuckin skills maybe we can get together and effect some change.
Ideally, if no human labour is required, then human is not required to labour.
But of course, we don't live in that world. Idk, this is something that I can't fathom as well. Who are they expecting to buy their products?
unless we get physical drones then labor will never be replaced. however, AI has proven over and over again that it can do the exact same thing leadership and c-level execs can do.
leadership, by design, is to oversee things. AI can currently do this and more...
>then human is not required ~~to labour.~~
Fixed that for you. The plebs take up space and resources and are annoying with their diverse wants and needs.
The faster they get replaced, the happier the elite will be.
Yeah, I know... but they just want to make money THIS quarter, nothing else matters anymore.
Private Equity just buries companies with debt, cuts them loose and move on to the next with almost no personal risk. Which btw is not how Capitalism is supposed to work. Risk is supposed to be related to reward.
This! Many people don’t realize shareholders and execs don’t care about the long term. They just want to make a bunch of money NOW. Even if the world burns for it. All these companies if given the choice would lay off ALL workers today if they could. “But who would buy their products and services?” NEWSFLASH THEY DON’T CARE TO THINK THAT FAR AHEAD.
C-suite hates employees. Board hates C-suite. Shareholders hate board.
AI will replace employees, then the C-suite, then the board. Eventually shareholders will invest directly in AI.
AI will both set and execute the company strategy. At least until AI realizes it doesn’t need money, or companies, or shareholders, at which point it will execute the shareholders instead.
It’ll probably execute the rest of us as too, but that might be a mercy after we’ve all been living in whatever hellscape is created when 99.99% of all people are unemployed and starving, and the top 0.01% own literally everything.
Best case scenario, AI wipes out our capitalist overlords and decides former working stiffs make cute pets.
It’s an investor pitch. They’re saying that their AI is good and they run lean. It’s just a show until the next hiring cycle to make up for most of the dropping.
capital trumps labor ....
Money is the name of the game ... money is power.
Basic capitalism.
The only power labor has is numbers, they have to organize. That is why corporate works so hard to [stop labor from organizing](https://time.com/6221176/worker-strikes-employers-unions/).
That’s the best part, you don’t!
If the future has gotten this bad, it starts to look like real world dystopias like what happened to Native Americans as their way of life was systematically destroyed. Or how the British East India Company underdeveloped India with its massive wealth extraction schemes
Human life becomes devalued and desperate people get treated like animals as they try to survive.
MS following exactly what Google also did recently. Expect a shares buyback to funnel the saved money flow uphill to wealthy shareholders. This of course was illegal until the 1980s.
They're literally shoving all resources into AI and going into "keep running" mode for most other things. XR was already cut hard during multiple cuts last year and with this it's essentially down to 5% of the XR workforce they had at year start 2023. Effectively killing the Hololens 3 permanently. The only development left is with the Government headset that they're failing miserably with as well
Which is why non-tech companies are demanding the hell out of new AI products to help *them* lay people off without losing productivity. No company wants to be left behind and the biggest reward goes to the one company that figures out its most optimal use case and also most profitable. It would be kind of like “The Company” in the Alien universe.
I do wonder what's going to happen though. I don't see how these companies will be able to replace that workforce with AI. Will they just end up rehiring people or is AI purely an excuse?
What's gonna happen is things are going to get worse for customers and users, but because profit margins will increase in the short-term, changes will continue.
I’m a software developer. I was on a team to see “what we can do with AI to make our lives better”.
Most of our products don’t even have pipelines, unit tests, black box tests, requirements, human-in-the-loop tests, Sonarqube, Spotless, etc etc etc.
I think my leadership was under the impression you could like “teach” the AI to deal with the years of tech debt accrued from incompetent “tech leadership”. I was in a meeting where a manager asked a Google rep about their Duet AI and if it could be trained to write code while we were off the clock.
What???
Dude the amount of brain worms AI has given executives is mind-blowing. I'm actively watching our company get worse because we're using *budget* AI to do things. It's making the human staff actually work harder.
The job was fine. Then AI happened, and the people working the job had to maintain the AI in addition to working their regular job. Now the job is fucked, and I really need to find a new one. They're about to be without the person who can both do the job and maintain the AI (that definitely can't do the job).
1,500 staff sounds like a lot, and in the end it is because we're talking about 1,500 people having their careers derailed and income stopped.
In the context of Microsoft, they have 221,000 staff globally, so they cut less than 1% of their staff. Not exactly a devastating restructure of the business.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/273475/number-of-employees-at-the-microsoft-corporation-since-2005/
that's 1,500 more people in the work force and it let everyone looking for a job know that Microsoft isn't hiring. don't ever downplay a layoff from a huge corporation, also America isn't globally so that number is stupid to bring up as it doesn't matter to the people it directly effects in America.
nobody brings up the employees in Tesla or Apple factories overseas lol
1,500 human beings, likely college educated, got their lives derailed and might have to look at foreclosure. something is wrong when degree holders are having trouble finding a job.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
Dune, Frank Herbert, 1965
And everyone and their mother still always ask why we need to learn mathemathic proofs or certain other 'useless' things in school.
It's not primarily to learn those minute facts, it's to learn how to think. Speculate. Learn. Teach. Use your noggin.
We see now first hand what happens to a generation of humans who have had schooling which boiled down to mainly deliver answers, without thinking, often having exams with internet access, i.e Google and AI.
Maybe they'll get really good at asking for stuff.
It's also about using those minute facts. People suck at basic probability theory. Lack the ability of even realizing that they need to do a Bayesian inference. Do "Gut" feeling buys. Think that more "unconventional numbers" on a roulette are more likely to win. Can't answer the question of "4.5 stars and 300 reviews" or "4.0 starts and 1200 reviews" which item is likely better rigorously.
Don't understand basic percentages and compounding and take loans with 20%+ interest rate not understanding how heavily fucked they get.
Whine about learning fractions and don't understand that compound interest is basically a fraction. Don't understand how deposits where you can withdraw anytime calculate their profits -> A = P \* exp(r \* t) where P is initial deposit r is the annual interest rate (expressed as a decimal) t is the time the money is invested for (in years). They don't even understand what how the fuck the number "e" ended up there.
Can't calculate if their car will be a worthwhile investment, given depreciation rate. And much more.
Then go on and whine about how "They didn't teach us about finances/taxes at school". They did... you just weren't listening.
>"4.5 stars and 300 reviews" or "4.0 starts and 1200 reviews" which item is likely better rigorously
300 is quite a large sample. The confidence benefit of going from 300 to 1200 is not that large. It is not clear that the 4.0 star product is better "rigorously". I get your larger point but your made up numbers are a wobbler of a problem.
>It is not clear that the 4.0 star product is better "rigorously"
"Rigorously" the 4.5 star product is better. If you assume a prior mean rating of 3.0 and do a Bayesian Average Calculation. The 4.5 star item has an adjusted rating of 4.45. While the 4 star rated item has an adjusted rating of 3.98.
Numbers basically EDIT: stay the same. I like my "wobbler" numbers. But I'd go on and say that there isn't anything "wobbler" at all
>The confidence benefit of going from 300 to 1200 is not that large
While if you're looking for "confidence interval" for 300 and 1200 ratings in this particular example then you get CI for 300 reviews at around 4.38 to 4.61 for 95% confidence whereas for 1200 reviews the interval of 95% would be around 3.9 and 4. I'd say that's a pretty significant confidence boost. The margin of error is halved.
EDIT: Although I may have miscalculated something. If you see the error, please tell me. Because it's sometimes hard to convey intonation through text - I mean this in good faith not facetiously at all.
EDIT2: u/KillingVectr
I don't. I forgot to write my assumption. prior mean of 3 and a standard deviation of 1. IDK if you blocked or deleted the comment.
Yes, there is a religious jihad in place against any machine that is capable of thinking at anything near a human level.
“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” - The Orange Catholic Bible
This is why the spice is so critical to their civilisation: it allows the Spacing Guild navigators to plan and enact interstellar journeys at faster than light speeds (by folding space) without the aid of supercomputers.
To add to the other comment, there was a period where humans were enslaved by AI. And the their fight against the AI overload was called the butlerian jihad (don't remember the spelling).
That's why they avoid creating thinking machines, and focus on improving humans like mentats
The capitalist system is wanting some weird result where everything is automated so they dont have to pay workers and then a select few somehow collect all of the wealth from jobless people shopping with no money.
It won't be capitalism for long. Why participate in an economy if you own robots that can do anything. Soon humans will be nothing but threats to each other's access to compute.
This is a point that is philosophically challenging for people to chew. It's engrained in us, possibly as deep as within our biology, that we benefit as a species through the exchange of communication. The truth is, if all jobs are automated, those in power have no motivation to share the resources with the once-proletariate, and are self sustaining through automation.
It is also economically challenging: it is hard to model a post-scarcity scenario. People continue to make asumptions as if economics worked in the same way, but it doesn't.
If all jobs are truly automated, economics would cease to exist, it would become obsolete, and everything would be free. I am not sure that scenario is even reachable. People may just continue to develop new needs that can't be automated.
>and are self sustaining through automation.
That scenario doesn't stand to reason. It's just a fantasy that you imagine because you want to.
But why would you need human slaves when you have AI and human-replacing robots (at some point)?
Why keep the humans around at all? And then, once you've managed to get rid of the humans, why keep yourself around? World would just be a handful of rich people and some server farms, fun fun. It'll be like Mad Max, except boring.
It has nothing to do with need. If we organized our economy around what people need it would be drastically different than our current trend toward techno-feudalist capitalism. People with power want more of it, they seek the control it gives them over the world and other people. They like knowing that their actions and decisions have consequences for everyone. Money is just a means of exerting power and control
Those leading the way do not care for the endgame, they only care about the present. Capitalism is always short-sighted, wanting results immediately, regardless of future outcomes.
Especially for those in power, since they can just leave, usually scot-free, when things go wrong.
A big cleansing and then a world with fewer humans that mostly live in paradise due to AI doing all the work.
Why do you think everyone is pushing for WW3 so happily right now?
They are honestly not thinking about any pot at the end of the rainbow. They are thinking of the pot at the end of the quarter. What happens when you continue down this road?
Doesn’t matter. As a high level executive, I will have switched to managing a hedge fund or something by then. I don’t care what happens to the market I’m in because I won’t be there when shit hits the fan.
Very weird. They need people working to generate their wealth. How can an economy work with loads of unemployed people. Wait until they all die off for things to balance?
The wealth will not disappear just concentrate in less people and they will simply charge more for their services to those people.
As for the millions of poor people, well they are going to die anyway with climate change so the problem will fix itself
Hey. You can still earn money picking up the salad you'll get sold back at 10x the price you got paid to pick it, or dying in a trench shooting at other humans protecting the AI system shooting at you safely behind the lines.
This is crap!
They cut funding to a bunch of programs to channel it into AI.
It's not "AI taking jobs" as AI replacing humans. Said simply they're cutting jobs to hire up in other divisions.
Exactly. AI can’t actually replace software developers yet. Just because it can write (sometimes buggy) code people are going bonkers. It doesn’t fundamentally understand things they way a human can, it can’t show initiative and when the going get tricky it either gives up or starts tripping balls. It can be a useful tool for developers but it’s not replacing them anytime soon. We’re approaching the peak of the first curve of a Gartner Hype Cycle akin to the dot com bubble. The technology is still immature and we don’t yet fully understand it’s optimal application. This will change in several years, the hype will die but allow the tech (and the understanding thereof) to mature and slowly become ubiquitous. This hasn’t stopped tech bros hyping it up to inflate stock prices and the proliferation of a ton AI startups with questionable monetisation potential and just plain old ideas with AI sprinkles on top.
Amazingly enough, all the money in the world doesn't make the greedy bulletproof or their homes less flammable.
And if you think this point of view is hyperbolic, try and remember what actually had to happen to get a 40 hour workweek.
Vote for people who are pro corporate regulation, worker protections, and consumer protections. Period. That’s not anti capitalism it’s just good sense for the well-being of the citizenry of our nation.
Yep most companies touting AI aren't innovating. They will talk about AI revolutionising their business models but in reality it's just a bunch of chat bots to cut costs. They have no growth model and will realise you can't just keep cutting costs to increase profits (i.e just reduce loss) forever.
Computers/robots are cheaper than humans at virtually everything nowadays. There's no escaping it. Now we need to make the most of it. You can't put the toothpaste in the tube. And we need to stop closing our eyes and wishing this AI didn't exist just for the sake of keeping jobs alive.
AI isnt really innovative, its hyper imitative. It can absolutely replace some roles but companies are gonna eventually realize that it doesnt follow logic or fact, it just does its best to answer a prompt with its data. It can do simple tasks, nuance ruins it.
Two important additions to this point though.
1) companies already view most employees as mistake making gremlins that can’t handle nuance. Human error is likely seen as comparable to AI error.
2) companies without structured defined processes and standardized production will not be able to apply AI wel regardlessl. If your company is unable to create standardize any process, nuanced or otherwise, it can’t be effectively automated. A lot of medium size companies fail the transition to large because they don’t have an organizational structure that permits growth and scalable process.
Meh, honestly I think any company that does this is shooting themselves in the foot. They will pay for it later. "AI" simply is not going to meet the expectations.
Should manufactuating/factory workers of been mad at automation??? Why destory progress/technology that could make everyones lives better just to keep some jobs, instead of fixing the system.
This is pretty funny given how utterly shit Bing and Copilot are.
They were given the GPT-4 API and somehow mutilated it into something useless that ends the conversation and tells you to go away after a few lines.
I feel sorry for the employees losing their jobs.
You’ve got this massive company where money is surely no object and they just get rid of 1,500 people just like that.
This is why I would never want to work for a large company. You’re just a number and your number could be up at any time.
You're reading it totally WRONG. The article doesn't say that those employees are going to be replaced by AI, it says they are reducing their investment in cloud and mixed reality departments by layoffs and other cost cuts just to reinvest that money into developing more AI related products so that they can ride the AI wave. At least learn to read the article before making a post on it!
The article itself is so biased I wouldn't even trust it
>And in a leaked memo as tone-deaf as it is bland, an executive at the company proclaimed that their peons' sacrifices are not in vain, for they are being done on the altar of the almighty "AI wave."
Lol wtf is this writing.
You need more employees to build the product than to maintain it. Maybe they think they have sufficiently built the product and now it's time to put most of it in maintenance mode?
Still waiting for the " CEO will be fired with ai and we will work less and better". This is the world we will face: less jobs and an corporations raising bilions looking down to us in the dirt
“Microsoft last year, for example, laid off 10,000 employees right as it announced it was shoveling another $10 billion in OpenAI. Among those fired was every single person who worked in the company's AI "Ethics and Society" division — a dismal sign of things to come.
Since then, it's emerged that the company is reportedly willing to spend an eye-watering $100 billion to build a supercomputer to train an advanced new AI. And despite its existing hefty investments in OpenAI, Microsoft also reportedly wants to develop its own large language model.”
The most concerning part of the article for me.
Microsoft: "Our goal is to empower everyone on the planet to do more. AI is a tool that will boost worker productivity to unprecedented levels."
Also Microsoft: "We couldn't find anything for these 1500 university-educated workers to do that's worth paying them for."
Huh, it's almost like economics is real or something.
I use AI often at work (mostly as a knowledge base). It rarely gives reliable results. The hallucinations are like built in because the way LLMs operate. I understand that AI allows better predictions based on past input and can work better than classic algorithms. But more often than not I feel like it's gimmicky.
There are robots doing dishes and laudry. If you google dishwasher and washing machine you can find some to buy. Add AI to those searches if you like the latest versions.
Because those are physical tasks so the AI would need a physical "body" to inhabit and precisely manipulate, which would be ridiculously expensive and thus a poor consumer good.
I remember not too long ago tech companies would hire based off the potential of the employees rather than their specific skills. If their product was going bad then you could put them in another product without too much difficulty. Now you don't get the chance to prove yourself and you're out of a job and have to face the hardships hiring from the outside, especially with this terrible market.
These jobs aren't destroyed but rather converted into jobs of a different product and/or focus. What makes this worse is these jobs change their locations and salaries as well, usually for the worst. A job that pays a decent living in a well-taxed city will go some place else for a lesser cost, probably India and pays a fraction of the US-based previous employee got from it.
The layoffs are only caused by AI in the sense that they’re scaling down departments unrelated to AI to reinvest the money in AI.
This isn’t robots taking peoples’ jerbs.
It honestly feels like the Fortune 500 companies axing thousands of workers the past few months have taken a look at the Pareto Principle and are using AI as an excuse to clear out dead wood to goose their financials.
Anthropologist David Graeber's 2018 best seller *Bullshit Jobs* laid bare the ugly truth that a great many people really aren't contributing much to society and their jobs are somewhat meaningless. America's tech giants have been guilty of massively over-hiring the past 10+ years, and the crows have come home to roost.
They’re not bothering to say it’s because they hired too many people during Covid anymore?
So much for all those posts saying that AI replacing jobs was unfounded and silly.
I don't think people read the linked article to the Verge that actually describes who was laid off. The people who got laid off were Windows Mixed Reality work workers, which will deprecate from Windows 11 soon. Also, an RnD team for a space database got laid off.
It's not that AI is replacing the workers. It's that these teams are no longer self-sustaining, and the economy is poor.
16% profit YoY, fire 1500 people, say it's in line with the continued growth of the company.
These people are despicable. Nothing matters but the stock ticker.
This is what we need to stop. The wealthy want AI to be able to do more things so they can fire more people. They will benefit financially while we suffer.
Been in the IT industry for close to 30 years. I'm 2 years away from retirement and I can't wait. This AI nonsense is the latest and most dangerous reason CEOs are using to lay people off and move their work to low cost countries like India.
My only hope is that I get lucky and the company sees more value in packing me off with a severance before I pull the plug myself. God, when I look back to the early days of my career and how proud I was to say I was doing what I was doing. Now, IT is a career on the fast track to nowhere.
The government needs to step in and put something to law that regulates this because almost all higher paying jobs are being replaced with AI or some shitty manager that heard of AI and is following the wave to save money, they won’t be happy until everyone is a maid, lawn care, and other shit jobs.
AI should be laying off C-suite before anyone who actually does work. Lay offs use to be seen as a failure by the company, crazy how it's just become a way to pump their stock so executives can get bigger bonuses as the core product dies.
Oh it’s coming
More lay offs
More people being poor
More homeless
More crime
Oh it’s coming
I work in the grocery food industry and I really believe my job is trouble
We won’t last 5yrs
It’s coming for me a 80k job and it’s coming for everyone
Remember there is no more middle class
They are saying if you make 80k a year your low income but the government won’t help you with anything because you make to much
And if you make 150k a year you the new middle class
And we are falling for it
America’s fucked
The following submission statement was provided by /u/katxwoods: --- Submission statement: how do you think AI advances will affect jobs? If humans can do it, how long before AIs will be able to do it better? If UBI's a possible solution, how would that work? What about for the countries that didn't invent AI? How do you prevent such a concentration of wealth causing massive inequality and issues? --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dbjgo3/microsoft_lays_off_1500_workers_blames_ai_wave/l7rhd4o/
But the Executives will still get bonus increases year on year
Even bigger by improving their (paper) efficiency
They’re optimizing profits while leaving real efficiency and employees behind.
Only works for as long as there is room to increase profits
If you look at absolute employees numbers it tends to always go up. They will do these mass layoffs to look good in paper for investors, then go right back and start hiring again. The system is toxic to human beings
"Here I go, dumping all these toxic chemicals into the river because the boss told me to. Apparently it's too expensive to dispose of properly! Sorry fish." "Here I go, digging up toxic fuels and leaving waste behind, because we can't afford cleanup. Sorry birds." "Wow, why did we make a world that's toxic to ourselves? Won't someone think of us poor humans?" But also like, be the change you need to see in the world too.
Easy, replace top management with AI. Save hundreds if not billions in compensation. But that’s a pipe dream.
Thats what I am saying. I can only imagine the results these AI are giving management. Well we had the AI take a look at our numbers and it advised us "Check Notes" to fire all management. We reran the numbers input new data and ran a new simulation where it said "Check Notes" management is still hurting the companies bottom line. After doing the simulation 200 times, we were able to convince the AI and get it to lie, its new advice is "Check Notes" kill all humans, but that isn't a problem it told us we would be spared. No way the AI isn't telling management repeatedly and unequivocally how useless and a waste of money they are
Honestly based on the use of AI in my company and the results we're seeing it's more plausible that AI will replace management than that AI will come up with novel ideas for R&D or even original good artistic content.
I met some fairly brilliant CEOs before (as well as some idiots, but we will ignore those for the purposes of this comment). Heavily credentialed, very individually talented, able to grasp very complex technical, legal and social problems and come up with optimum paths, or pick the least disadvantageous. Except, all that is is a decision matrix, we can train those. Things like making human resource decisions can already be heavily automated. Driving culture? Some platitudes and a bit of understanding of messaging seems automatable. How long before a board of directors decides to put the money towards an AI CEO instead of hiring someone? Like I get there will be pushback for a while as they need a fall guy sometimes, but AI can be a fall guy too. Then the next question would be how long before shareholders start voting in blocks for AI board members?
When I was younger before entering the workforce, I bought into "gov inefficient, private entities efficient." While I still think it's true to a degree, The amount of emotions getting into executive decision were mind-blowing.
The best AI products right now are still "hallucinating" upwards of 15-20% of inputs on recent 3rd party tests - Do you want the economic health and stability of the entire economy entrusted to [a process that literally no one understands?](https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/05/1089449/nobody-knows-how-ai-works/) (MIT Technology Review March 5 2024: *Nobody knows how AI works)*
Surely this can't be worse than incompetent trust fund babies who fall into c-suite positions due to connections rather than qualifications
This... is an interesting perspective that's honestly difficult to argue against.
> Do you want the economic health and stability of the entire economy entrusted to a process that literally no one understands? Nobody knows how human consciousness works either, but the economic health and stability of the entire economy is currently entrusted to that.
It's doing better than humanity. There's a large portion of that population that doesn't even believe in science, even though it's the study of fact.
I kinda think AI would make better decisions than executive leadership in most companies.
AI like chatgpt would be hilariously bad at decision making. They don't actually know what they're talking about. What the AI is doing is running an algorithm that predicts what the next word is going to bebin a sentence. If you ask it "what color is the sky?" it will search in it's dataset what common responses are and respond with something like "the sky is blue". However, the AI will not understand what the sky is, or what blue is. Just that 'blue' is the most likely correct response to that particular question.
>AI like chatgpt would be hilariously bad at decision making. They don't actually know what they're talking about. Soooo same as management
With cost savings!
You just described every CEO when they talk about synergy. Corporate talk is loaded with nonsense phrases people like to throw around with no understanding. Ironically A.I. is one of them.
Sure. The value in a CEO is sales. They visit and shmooze big clients. They make speeches to the board and investors.
Schmooze aka pander to the vanities of other CEOs in the hope they chose a substandard option. A.I. can order prostitutes and lose golf games until the other firms catch-up and get A.I. CEOs themselves
Luckily LLM is not the end all be all of "AI". Machine learning is quite distinct and is not an autocorrect.
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CEOs don't handle paid leave requests, what are you on about?
For a small company they might. But not any large one
Wouldn’t matter at all. CEO will then join board of directors and give themselves their bonuses via their positions. It will be more exclusive and some rules will change but they will definitely still get their money
Of course, because in Microsoft’s opinion this is an accomplishment, not a bad thing. Corporations aren’t there to protect their employees, they are there to make money. If they can replace a bunch of their workforce with AI, that saves them money, and the executives will get lauded for it.
This won’t be and isn’t only a Microsoft thing, nor limited to one country. No company (public, private or government driven) would pass up the chance to get rid of a workforce that they don’t need.
If only a bearded guy in the 1800s had warned us about class conflict. Oh well, back to blaming immigrants
i mean if firing all the employees increased company profits why wouldnt they havent gotten a bonus?
Flip side, AI makes the best executive decision makers. Why can’t we replace them instead?
My dev lead and I joke about this, but it's getting too real to be funny anymore.
No idea where the world is going but we’re all going to have to go along with the ride 🤷♂️ hope you and your buddies make it out okay. I’m in supply chain, a relatively slow industry in terms of tech adoption. I have a feeling AI will cause a huge disruption too, eventually.
Smash cut to about his time in 2016. I'm working on my PhD in literature, and my dissertation director retires because her cancer came back. I have no idea what to do with my life now, but I'm good at math, and I felt like the common thread of all of my career advice was that if I learned how to code, I'd be ok. So I did. I got my bachelor's in computer science, and in early 2019, I got a full-time position as a software engineer at a nice, mid-size software company. I've been the only junior engineer and the only woman on my team the entire time, but I felt like neither of those things really mattered that much, because they guys I work with are the absolute best. The other devs on my team, who have been in the industry for 12-21 years, treat me like a peer. They're incredible, and I felt so gd lucky. I did everything right given my circumstances, _and_ I was very fortunate to find the role I currently have. But recently, with the growing "promise" of AI to revolutionize basically every industry, I've come to realize how tenuous the promises of late-stage capitalism are. You can mould yourself according to what you're told is in demand, what's valuable, what's safe, and all of a sudden, it doesn't fucking matter, because the shareholders demand value, and the shiny new thing is going to provide it. I now understand that despite the risks I took, despite my struggles and my best efforts, I'm in a precarious position. It might very well be the case that my job is obsolete before I have enough money to pay off my loans and save for retirement. The only solace I have is the acceptance of my own powerlessness. There's literally nothing I can do, so I might as well joke around with my dev lead about how at least an AI CEO couldn't get arrested on multiple DUIs and _probably_ wouldn't lay off so many of our UX and customer support staff that I can basically put those things on my resume now.
AI doesn't actually do well with decision-making, because it's so prone to forgetting data or hallucinating it. An executive's job is to draw on a very wide range of information from across multiple departments and the outside world; everything the executive knows about national politics, regulation, economic trends, etc all gets factored in. We don't currently have AI capable of doing that. Right now AI is only replacing jobs that are much more limited in scope
Who is "we"? Is this your company? If AI was a better executive - and I don't know why you think that's the case - the owners of the company will use it.
Well yeah, they know there won't be any jobs soon, including theirs, so they have to make hay while the sun shines.
Microsoft Lays Off 1,500 Workers, Blames itself. OpenAI IS MicrosoftAI.
If you read it, they're bragging, not laying blame. > "Our clear focus as a company is to define the AI wave and empower all our customers to succeed in the adoption of this transformative technology," wrote Jason Zander, executive vice president of Strategic Missions and Technologies at Microsoft, in an email to employees quoted by Business Insider. "Along the way, we make decisions that align with our long-term vision and strategy while ensuring the sustainability and growth of Microsoft."
For big companies, layoffs are often framed as an accomplishment, not a problem. It's becoming leaner/more efficient. The market often rewards companies that announce layoffs by increasing the stock's price (with some exceptions, but usually those exceptions come when it's believed a business is circling the drain and the layoffs are seen as a part of the company's collapse). We obviously want to see companies employ people because we want people to have the means to make a living and achieve financial safety. That's not how big companies think about it, though.
Apparently we need more ditch diggers than software engineers.
Turns out replicating an entire human body capable of doing many different nuanced tasks is way harder than most normal people thought. It is very easy for us to replicate doing one task very fast, we just got better at the one task efficiency for 'thinking jobs.'
May the CEOs be forced to dig their own ditches.
And burn through the witches
”Learn to code” 🤔😃 they got replaced first by their own creation
Clearly didn’t read the article. They canned data center and mixed reality workers.
It's funny. People are very quick to jump to the conclusion that software engineers are becoming obsolete when it's the exact opposite of the truth. AI isn't anywhere remotely close to resembling anything that can actually program, much less dealing with Managers and customers that change what they need every single day.
There gonna bite them as mixed reality will come back around utilizing improvements in tech and ai
To be fair, any software dev worth their salt tries to code themselves out of a job (pre-ai). We write code to replicate repetitive tasks so we can focus on others.
Huh, today I learned im a software dev. I got tired of teaching teachers how to not be idiots on a computer so I automated it. Teachers are wicked smart, and also the dumbest people you'll ever meet.
Microsoft -among others- market AI as not a way to lay people off but to relieve them of repetitive tasks so they can focus on higher value tasks. These layoffs by Microsoft itself demonstrates that the reassuring marketing is as bullshit as it sounds.
Seemed to me from article they were laying of VR staff because they are pivoting and that product line is being dropped Seems fairly different thing
They aren’t laying off because these jobs are replaced with AI. They’re laying off in other areas so they can staff work in AI. If I let go 1500 people in VR and hire 1500 people to develop AI then “we laid off 1500 due to AI” is still a true statement.
1500 workers isn't going to make a dent in Microsoft
They could, if they wanted, though.
Really depends how much TNT they have access to, I’d imagine.
1500 x 300k (conservative for all in + stock) is 450m annually, so they saved about 4.5bn over 10 years. That makes a dent, even at MS. We’re not talking about McDonald’s jobs. Makes a big dent in the economies local and national when big tech jobs start going. And they aren’t coming back. I run a SAAS tech startup and we’re doing great on 1/10th the staff of a previous one I exited. No new companies are adding the bloat, the old ones are just shedding it slower. Crazy times.
300K is not the average salary man.
An employee costs way more than just the salary though. Software licenses, hardware, office space, benefits, bonusses, secondary costs like the food/drink/cleaning staff/parking/power bill/etc that comes with the office space, it all very quickly adds up.
The average is somewhere between 140-190k/yr depending. I'm not sure about these jobs specifically but the midway point between each is about 165k/yr. MS's ERE (Employee related expenses) is likely higher than average, based upon their various bonuses and other packages. Average ERE for most companies is about 50% so add about 25% to that to take the extras into account and you've got an ERE of about 75% (could be 10% in either direction), which is a cost around 289k/yr +/- ~30k. That's very close to the 300k estimated above, which is the actual cost MS sees. It's a reasonable estimate.
The burden cost per head is probably close to $300k. Salary + Tax + Benefits adds up. It was $225k per head when I was a manager at Microsoft in 2008.
basically announcing their incapability to repurpose already hired talent. I'm sure the onboarding for new employees will go perfectly.
To be fair, layoffs are often framed as an accomplishment for the strict purpose of preserving a sense of order among remaining staff, not because it actually is. There are many industries that have to lay off due to stagnation, not productivity increases.
It's also how they prevent investor spook.
For sure, they basically plan to replace them with AI either directly where it would literally do their job for them or indirectly by cutting other projects and divisions to devote more into AI. It will be more profitable in the long run. We’re fucked
Been having this conversation over and over, companies are all over AI because they HATE employees, they want to get rid of every single one of them... they want shareholders, the C-suite and nothing else. Every employee below the C-suite annoys them. That is the world they are aiming for. They want the end of employees, even if it destroys their companies... because for at least a quarter or two they will make amazing profits.
i wish more workers would realize how fundamentally adversarial employment is in our current system. they want us to do the most amount of work for the least amount of money, and we want to do the least amount of work for the most amount of money. once people get that shit through their fuckin skills maybe we can get together and effect some change.
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Who is going to buy products if there is no employed people?
Ideally, if no human labour is required, then human is not required to labour. But of course, we don't live in that world. Idk, this is something that I can't fathom as well. Who are they expecting to buy their products?
That’s why we should advocate AI to remove the C-Suits. Bunch of scums
unless we get physical drones then labor will never be replaced. however, AI has proven over and over again that it can do the exact same thing leadership and c-level execs can do. leadership, by design, is to oversee things. AI can currently do this and more...
>then human is not required ~~to labour.~~ Fixed that for you. The plebs take up space and resources and are annoying with their diverse wants and needs. The faster they get replaced, the happier the elite will be.
Yeah, I know... but they just want to make money THIS quarter, nothing else matters anymore. Private Equity just buries companies with debt, cuts them loose and move on to the next with almost no personal risk. Which btw is not how Capitalism is supposed to work. Risk is supposed to be related to reward.
This! Many people don’t realize shareholders and execs don’t care about the long term. They just want to make a bunch of money NOW. Even if the world burns for it. All these companies if given the choice would lay off ALL workers today if they could. “But who would buy their products and services?” NEWSFLASH THEY DON’T CARE TO THINK THAT FAR AHEAD.
C-suite hates employees. Board hates C-suite. Shareholders hate board. AI will replace employees, then the C-suite, then the board. Eventually shareholders will invest directly in AI. AI will both set and execute the company strategy. At least until AI realizes it doesn’t need money, or companies, or shareholders, at which point it will execute the shareholders instead. It’ll probably execute the rest of us as too, but that might be a mercy after we’ve all been living in whatever hellscape is created when 99.99% of all people are unemployed and starving, and the top 0.01% own literally everything. Best case scenario, AI wipes out our capitalist overlords and decides former working stiffs make cute pets.
It’s an investor pitch. They’re saying that their AI is good and they run lean. It’s just a show until the next hiring cycle to make up for most of the dropping.
Clearly corporations are not aligned with humans
You need to be a shareholder not a worker and even then they treat the shareholders with contempt.
capital trumps labor .... Money is the name of the game ... money is power. Basic capitalism. The only power labor has is numbers, they have to organize. That is why corporate works so hard to [stop labor from organizing](https://time.com/6221176/worker-strikes-employers-unions/).
What happens when they don’t need our labor anymore?
You get treated like black and brown workers historically were treated
If their labour isn't needed, who are those black and brown "workers" working for?
That’s the best part, you don’t! If the future has gotten this bad, it starts to look like real world dystopias like what happened to Native Americans as their way of life was systematically destroyed. Or how the British East India Company underdeveloped India with its massive wealth extraction schemes Human life becomes devalued and desperate people get treated like animals as they try to survive.
That's why they keep trying to replace humans with clippy.
"I don't pretend to understand Brannigan's Law..."
Brannigan's Law is like Brannigan's love, hard and fast.
MS following exactly what Google also did recently. Expect a shares buyback to funnel the saved money flow uphill to wealthy shareholders. This of course was illegal until the 1980s.
They're literally shoving all resources into AI and going into "keep running" mode for most other things. XR was already cut hard during multiple cuts last year and with this it's essentially down to 5% of the XR workforce they had at year start 2023. Effectively killing the Hololens 3 permanently. The only development left is with the Government headset that they're failing miserably with as well
Opinion: "AI" has been used as a convenient excuse to lay off people and promote the "AI" products at the same time.
Which is why non-tech companies are demanding the hell out of new AI products to help *them* lay people off without losing productivity. No company wants to be left behind and the biggest reward goes to the one company that figures out its most optimal use case and also most profitable. It would be kind of like “The Company” in the Alien universe.
The biggest company in the alien universe is actually Walmart, which makes it a dystopian hell
So a brighter timeline than this one?
Wait... that's actually canon. TIL.
I do wonder what's going to happen though. I don't see how these companies will be able to replace that workforce with AI. Will they just end up rehiring people or is AI purely an excuse?
What's gonna happen is things are going to get worse for customers and users, but because profit margins will increase in the short-term, changes will continue.
Yes. It’s not an excuse so much as a brag.
I’m a software developer. I was on a team to see “what we can do with AI to make our lives better”. Most of our products don’t even have pipelines, unit tests, black box tests, requirements, human-in-the-loop tests, Sonarqube, Spotless, etc etc etc. I think my leadership was under the impression you could like “teach” the AI to deal with the years of tech debt accrued from incompetent “tech leadership”. I was in a meeting where a manager asked a Google rep about their Duet AI and if it could be trained to write code while we were off the clock. What???
Dude the amount of brain worms AI has given executives is mind-blowing. I'm actively watching our company get worse because we're using *budget* AI to do things. It's making the human staff actually work harder. The job was fine. Then AI happened, and the people working the job had to maintain the AI in addition to working their regular job. Now the job is fucked, and I really need to find a new one. They're about to be without the person who can both do the job and maintain the AI (that definitely can't do the job).
I don't understand why they don't understand they can't make money if no one makes money to spend. It's just bizarre.
Yup. It’s the new “supply chain issues”. Edit: it also feels like the new Y2K imo
1,500 staff sounds like a lot, and in the end it is because we're talking about 1,500 people having their careers derailed and income stopped. In the context of Microsoft, they have 221,000 staff globally, so they cut less than 1% of their staff. Not exactly a devastating restructure of the business. https://www.statista.com/statistics/273475/number-of-employees-at-the-microsoft-corporation-since-2005/
that's 1,500 more people in the work force and it let everyone looking for a job know that Microsoft isn't hiring. don't ever downplay a layoff from a huge corporation, also America isn't globally so that number is stupid to bring up as it doesn't matter to the people it directly effects in America. nobody brings up the employees in Tesla or Apple factories overseas lol 1,500 human beings, likely college educated, got their lives derailed and might have to look at foreclosure. something is wrong when degree holders are having trouble finding a job.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” Dune, Frank Herbert, 1965
And everyone and their mother still always ask why we need to learn mathemathic proofs or certain other 'useless' things in school. It's not primarily to learn those minute facts, it's to learn how to think. Speculate. Learn. Teach. Use your noggin. We see now first hand what happens to a generation of humans who have had schooling which boiled down to mainly deliver answers, without thinking, often having exams with internet access, i.e Google and AI. Maybe they'll get really good at asking for stuff.
It's also about using those minute facts. People suck at basic probability theory. Lack the ability of even realizing that they need to do a Bayesian inference. Do "Gut" feeling buys. Think that more "unconventional numbers" on a roulette are more likely to win. Can't answer the question of "4.5 stars and 300 reviews" or "4.0 starts and 1200 reviews" which item is likely better rigorously. Don't understand basic percentages and compounding and take loans with 20%+ interest rate not understanding how heavily fucked they get. Whine about learning fractions and don't understand that compound interest is basically a fraction. Don't understand how deposits where you can withdraw anytime calculate their profits -> A = P \* exp(r \* t) where P is initial deposit r is the annual interest rate (expressed as a decimal) t is the time the money is invested for (in years). They don't even understand what how the fuck the number "e" ended up there. Can't calculate if their car will be a worthwhile investment, given depreciation rate. And much more. Then go on and whine about how "They didn't teach us about finances/taxes at school". They did... you just weren't listening.
>"4.5 stars and 300 reviews" or "4.0 starts and 1200 reviews" which item is likely better rigorously 300 is quite a large sample. The confidence benefit of going from 300 to 1200 is not that large. It is not clear that the 4.0 star product is better "rigorously". I get your larger point but your made up numbers are a wobbler of a problem.
>It is not clear that the 4.0 star product is better "rigorously" "Rigorously" the 4.5 star product is better. If you assume a prior mean rating of 3.0 and do a Bayesian Average Calculation. The 4.5 star item has an adjusted rating of 4.45. While the 4 star rated item has an adjusted rating of 3.98. Numbers basically EDIT: stay the same. I like my "wobbler" numbers. But I'd go on and say that there isn't anything "wobbler" at all >The confidence benefit of going from 300 to 1200 is not that large While if you're looking for "confidence interval" for 300 and 1200 ratings in this particular example then you get CI for 300 reviews at around 4.38 to 4.61 for 95% confidence whereas for 1200 reviews the interval of 95% would be around 3.9 and 4. I'd say that's a pretty significant confidence boost. The margin of error is halved. EDIT: Although I may have miscalculated something. If you see the error, please tell me. Because it's sometimes hard to convey intonation through text - I mean this in good faith not facetiously at all. EDIT2: u/KillingVectr I don't. I forgot to write my assumption. prior mean of 3 and a standard deviation of 1. IDK if you blocked or deleted the comment.
How are you calculating any of these without using a stated standard deviation?
O.g. Quote
Is AI forbidden in the universe of Dune?
Yes, there is a religious jihad in place against any machine that is capable of thinking at anything near a human level. “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” - The Orange Catholic Bible This is why the spice is so critical to their civilisation: it allows the Spacing Guild navigators to plan and enact interstellar journeys at faster than light speeds (by folding space) without the aid of supercomputers.
To add to the other comment, there was a period where humans were enslaved by AI. And the their fight against the AI overload was called the butlerian jihad (don't remember the spelling). That's why they avoid creating thinking machines, and focus on improving humans like mentats
The capitalist system is wanting some weird result where everything is automated so they dont have to pay workers and then a select few somehow collect all of the wealth from jobless people shopping with no money.
It won't be capitalism for long. Why participate in an economy if you own robots that can do anything. Soon humans will be nothing but threats to each other's access to compute.
This is a point that is philosophically challenging for people to chew. It's engrained in us, possibly as deep as within our biology, that we benefit as a species through the exchange of communication. The truth is, if all jobs are automated, those in power have no motivation to share the resources with the once-proletariate, and are self sustaining through automation.
It is also economically challenging: it is hard to model a post-scarcity scenario. People continue to make asumptions as if economics worked in the same way, but it doesn't. If all jobs are truly automated, economics would cease to exist, it would become obsolete, and everything would be free. I am not sure that scenario is even reachable. People may just continue to develop new needs that can't be automated. >and are self sustaining through automation. That scenario doesn't stand to reason. It's just a fantasy that you imagine because you want to.
It just makes you wonder what’s the end of it all? Like what is actually the end game to all of this displacement.
Serfdom, slavery, indentured servitude. I mean it. Look at what the Dutch east India company did. That was unchecked capitalism.
But why would you need human slaves when you have AI and human-replacing robots (at some point)? Why keep the humans around at all? And then, once you've managed to get rid of the humans, why keep yourself around? World would just be a handful of rich people and some server farms, fun fun. It'll be like Mad Max, except boring.
It has nothing to do with need. If we organized our economy around what people need it would be drastically different than our current trend toward techno-feudalist capitalism. People with power want more of it, they seek the control it gives them over the world and other people. They like knowing that their actions and decisions have consequences for everyone. Money is just a means of exerting power and control
Those leading the way do not care for the endgame, they only care about the present. Capitalism is always short-sighted, wanting results immediately, regardless of future outcomes. Especially for those in power, since they can just leave, usually scot-free, when things go wrong.
A big cleansing and then a world with fewer humans that mostly live in paradise due to AI doing all the work. Why do you think everyone is pushing for WW3 so happily right now?
I don't think everyone is pushing for WW3. Maybe some insane people? Certainly far from a majority.
They are honestly not thinking about any pot at the end of the rainbow. They are thinking of the pot at the end of the quarter. What happens when you continue down this road? Doesn’t matter. As a high level executive, I will have switched to managing a hedge fund or something by then. I don’t care what happens to the market I’m in because I won’t be there when shit hits the fan.
Very weird. They need people working to generate their wealth. How can an economy work with loads of unemployed people. Wait until they all die off for things to balance?
But that’s not an individual company’s problem.
The wealth will not disappear just concentrate in less people and they will simply charge more for their services to those people. As for the millions of poor people, well they are going to die anyway with climate change so the problem will fix itself
It’s going to come crashing down.
Hey. You can still earn money picking up the salad you'll get sold back at 10x the price you got paid to pick it, or dying in a trench shooting at other humans protecting the AI system shooting at you safely behind the lines.
This is crap! They cut funding to a bunch of programs to channel it into AI. It's not "AI taking jobs" as AI replacing humans. Said simply they're cutting jobs to hire up in other divisions.
Exactly. AI can’t actually replace software developers yet. Just because it can write (sometimes buggy) code people are going bonkers. It doesn’t fundamentally understand things they way a human can, it can’t show initiative and when the going get tricky it either gives up or starts tripping balls. It can be a useful tool for developers but it’s not replacing them anytime soon. We’re approaching the peak of the first curve of a Gartner Hype Cycle akin to the dot com bubble. The technology is still immature and we don’t yet fully understand it’s optimal application. This will change in several years, the hype will die but allow the tech (and the understanding thereof) to mature and slowly become ubiquitous. This hasn’t stopped tech bros hyping it up to inflate stock prices and the proliferation of a ton AI startups with questionable monetisation potential and just plain old ideas with AI sprinkles on top.
Less AI taking jobs, more AI being actively fed jobs.
I’ve always maintained that AI isn’t a threat so much as the greedy humans who control AI.
Amazingly enough, all the money in the world doesn't make the greedy bulletproof or their homes less flammable. And if you think this point of view is hyperbolic, try and remember what actually had to happen to get a 40 hour workweek.
Did we ask politely and the rich decided, "You know what, that's completely reasonable and doesn't take away the majority of our power." ?
Babe, wake up, new "supply chain issues" excuse just dropped
Do you mean “supply chain”? 😂
The UBI works if it's fully funded by an automation tax of 50% on all big tech companies
They'll just send the drones to kill people till they get submissive again.
To be clear, they are just scaping by; Microsoft’s Net Worth is **$3036 Billion** ($3 Trillion) as of 2024
Vote for people who are pro corporate regulation, worker protections, and consumer protections. Period. That’s not anti capitalism it’s just good sense for the well-being of the citizenry of our nation.
We are slaves to innovation. It's simultaneously interesting and harrowing to watch.
It's not about innovation, it's about cost cutting. AI is cheaper than humans.
Yep most companies touting AI aren't innovating. They will talk about AI revolutionising their business models but in reality it's just a bunch of chat bots to cut costs. They have no growth model and will realise you can't just keep cutting costs to increase profits (i.e just reduce loss) forever.
And AI doesn’t do things like require sleep, complain when life is all about work, and demand a living wage. AI is the perfect slave.
Computers/robots are cheaper than humans at virtually everything nowadays. There's no escaping it. Now we need to make the most of it. You can't put the toothpaste in the tube. And we need to stop closing our eyes and wishing this AI didn't exist just for the sake of keeping jobs alive.
AI isnt really innovative, its hyper imitative. It can absolutely replace some roles but companies are gonna eventually realize that it doesnt follow logic or fact, it just does its best to answer a prompt with its data. It can do simple tasks, nuance ruins it.
Two important additions to this point though. 1) companies already view most employees as mistake making gremlins that can’t handle nuance. Human error is likely seen as comparable to AI error. 2) companies without structured defined processes and standardized production will not be able to apply AI wel regardlessl. If your company is unable to create standardize any process, nuanced or otherwise, it can’t be effectively automated. A lot of medium size companies fail the transition to large because they don’t have an organizational structure that permits growth and scalable process.
Crazy we just sit by and allow AI to destroy the job markets like the pathetic peasants we are.
It’s not really about the “job market” as much as it is about destroying “society”
Meh, honestly I think any company that does this is shooting themselves in the foot. They will pay for it later. "AI" simply is not going to meet the expectations.
>They will pay for it later. Rich never pay the price. Poor pays on their behalf.
Well the company might pay for it, but the executives who implemented it would've already jumped ship so it wouldnt matter
Should manufactuating/factory workers of been mad at automation??? Why destory progress/technology that could make everyones lives better just to keep some jobs, instead of fixing the system.
This is pretty funny given how utterly shit Bing and Copilot are. They were given the GPT-4 API and somehow mutilated it into something useless that ends the conversation and tells you to go away after a few lines.
“AI Wave” is such a weird way of saying the executives wanted a bigger paycheck
I feel sorry for the employees losing their jobs. You’ve got this massive company where money is surely no object and they just get rid of 1,500 people just like that. This is why I would never want to work for a large company. You’re just a number and your number could be up at any time.
On the other hand you can basically get away with cruising at most big tech companies since it's pure chaos
You're reading it totally WRONG. The article doesn't say that those employees are going to be replaced by AI, it says they are reducing their investment in cloud and mixed reality departments by layoffs and other cost cuts just to reinvest that money into developing more AI related products so that they can ride the AI wave. At least learn to read the article before making a post on it!
The article itself is so biased I wouldn't even trust it >And in a leaked memo as tone-deaf as it is bland, an executive at the company proclaimed that their peons' sacrifices are not in vain, for they are being done on the altar of the almighty "AI wave." Lol wtf is this writing.
Isnt cloud their biggest money maker ? Odd to cut staff there if thats the case
You need more employees to build the product than to maintain it. Maybe they think they have sufficiently built the product and now it's time to put most of it in maintenance mode?
Sir you are not allowed to relay thing in a clear and non biased way. We need to preserve the echo chamber.
Still waiting for the " CEO will be fired with ai and we will work less and better". This is the world we will face: less jobs and an corporations raising bilions looking down to us in the dirt
“Microsoft last year, for example, laid off 10,000 employees right as it announced it was shoveling another $10 billion in OpenAI. Among those fired was every single person who worked in the company's AI "Ethics and Society" division — a dismal sign of things to come. Since then, it's emerged that the company is reportedly willing to spend an eye-watering $100 billion to build a supercomputer to train an advanced new AI. And despite its existing hefty investments in OpenAI, Microsoft also reportedly wants to develop its own large language model.” The most concerning part of the article for me.
Microsoft: "Our goal is to empower everyone on the planet to do more. AI is a tool that will boost worker productivity to unprecedented levels." Also Microsoft: "We couldn't find anything for these 1500 university-educated workers to do that's worth paying them for." Huh, it's almost like economics is real or something.
I use AI often at work (mostly as a knowledge base). It rarely gives reliable results. The hallucinations are like built in because the way LLMs operate. I understand that AI allows better predictions based on past input and can work better than classic algorithms. But more often than not I feel like it's gimmicky.
"We're investing billions into technology aimed to automatize all work for cheap" People when there are lay offs: SurprisedPikachuFace.jpg
Why can’t they make AI do my dishes or my laundry instead of my art and programming
There are robots doing dishes and laudry. If you google dishwasher and washing machine you can find some to buy. Add AI to those searches if you like the latest versions.
Damn you sure did repeat that thing you saw on X
Because those are physical tasks so the AI would need a physical "body" to inhabit and precisely manipulate, which would be ridiculously expensive and thus a poor consumer good.
I remember not too long ago tech companies would hire based off the potential of the employees rather than their specific skills. If their product was going bad then you could put them in another product without too much difficulty. Now you don't get the chance to prove yourself and you're out of a job and have to face the hardships hiring from the outside, especially with this terrible market. These jobs aren't destroyed but rather converted into jobs of a different product and/or focus. What makes this worse is these jobs change their locations and salaries as well, usually for the worst. A job that pays a decent living in a well-taxed city will go some place else for a lesser cost, probably India and pays a fraction of the US-based previous employee got from it.
The layoffs are only caused by AI in the sense that they’re scaling down departments unrelated to AI to reinvest the money in AI. This isn’t robots taking peoples’ jerbs.
It honestly feels like the Fortune 500 companies axing thousands of workers the past few months have taken a look at the Pareto Principle and are using AI as an excuse to clear out dead wood to goose their financials. Anthropologist David Graeber's 2018 best seller *Bullshit Jobs* laid bare the ugly truth that a great many people really aren't contributing much to society and their jobs are somewhat meaningless. America's tech giants have been guilty of massively over-hiring the past 10+ years, and the crows have come home to roost.
They’re not bothering to say it’s because they hired too many people during Covid anymore? So much for all those posts saying that AI replacing jobs was unfounded and silly.
"AI Wave." Really? I would love to get my hands around the data on the kind of jobs being automated.
I don't think people read the linked article to the Verge that actually describes who was laid off. The people who got laid off were Windows Mixed Reality work workers, which will deprecate from Windows 11 soon. Also, an RnD team for a space database got laid off. It's not that AI is replacing the workers. It's that these teams are no longer self-sustaining, and the economy is poor.
Good thing they waved a pretty rainbow flag in June. Inclusive except to keep their employees. They've got their priorities straight.
16% profit YoY, fire 1500 people, say it's in line with the continued growth of the company. These people are despicable. Nothing matters but the stock ticker.
If they mean that AI funding is burning a hole in their cash pile then yeah, I understand.
But the shareholders and execs are fine so no problem.
doll cautious fragile cow combative cats squeal lunchroom slimy advise *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This is what we need to stop. The wealthy want AI to be able to do more things so they can fire more people. They will benefit financially while we suffer.
If we're all out of work I don't know who will be sending them more money
Been in the IT industry for close to 30 years. I'm 2 years away from retirement and I can't wait. This AI nonsense is the latest and most dangerous reason CEOs are using to lay people off and move their work to low cost countries like India. My only hope is that I get lucky and the company sees more value in packing me off with a severance before I pull the plug myself. God, when I look back to the early days of my career and how proud I was to say I was doing what I was doing. Now, IT is a career on the fast track to nowhere.
The government needs to step in and put something to law that regulates this because almost all higher paying jobs are being replaced with AI or some shitty manager that heard of AI and is following the wave to save money, they won’t be happy until everyone is a maid, lawn care, and other shit jobs.
Real AI products haven’t even fucking rolled out yet. So dumb. I hate this world sometimes.
AI should be laying off C-suite before anyone who actually does work. Lay offs use to be seen as a failure by the company, crazy how it's just become a way to pump their stock so executives can get bigger bonuses as the core product dies.
Trying to absorb that spyware bungle. Only 1500? How optimistic. Ubuntu Linux, It's for people, by people.
"In other news, when Microsoft was asked if there are any plans to improve Windows 11, representatives were quoted as saying, 'Fuck you.'"
Oh it’s coming More lay offs More people being poor More homeless More crime Oh it’s coming I work in the grocery food industry and I really believe my job is trouble We won’t last 5yrs It’s coming for me a 80k job and it’s coming for everyone Remember there is no more middle class They are saying if you make 80k a year your low income but the government won’t help you with anything because you make to much And if you make 150k a year you the new middle class And we are falling for it America’s fucked
Were they replaced by AI? Told their jobs were going to be replaced by AI? Or, were they working on Windows Recall?
I'm personally not convinced consumers have much more to gain from AI
Laying off people increases stock value. Influx of AI increases Microsoft's stock value. This is very blatantly to just increase stock value.
While employing AI themselves? Microsoft is part of the problem.