This article assumes the falsehood that LLMs are actually displacing tech jobs while maintaining productivity.
It doesn't. Further down it says that tech companies use AI as an excuse for layoffs but AI usage hasn't led to increased productivity that was promised.
As I’m writing this essay, big companies are on a layoff bender. Thousands of people are being fired all over the place. Executives are often claiming these headcount reductions are a result of AI. They aren’t. At the moment, AI automation is not creating anywhere near the increased efficiency necessary to justify hundreds of thousands of lost jobs.
Knowledge work’s one saving grace, until recently, was that it was still executed by humans. We were needed. It was flesh-and-blood humans who sat down to work through a challenge, built the slide deck, wrote the customer response and developed the strategy. Even if it was existentially meaningless, there was human thought, collaborative work and creativity poured into that work, giving it life.
Now, AI agents are increasingly executing much of that work for Knowledge Workers. It is common for people responsible for integrating these tools into their organizations, myself included, to describe the future of work as one in which all humans will essentially be managers of armies of AI agents. That seems pretty great. Let the software compile the reports, chase down the data, format the deck, draft the first pass of documentation and handle the dozens of small, repetitive tasks that used to quietly eat an afternoon.
(back to quoting you)
Further down it says that tech companies use AI as an excuse for layoffs but AI usage hasn’t led to increased productivity that was promised.
They're saying it isn't so productive as to justify the scale of layoffs. But they stll, throughout the article, assert or imply that "AI" is highly productive and increases efficiency.
It doesn't. Further down it says that tech companies use AI as an excuse for layoffs but AI usage hasn't led to increased productivity that was promised.
It does though. From the article:
(back to quoting you)
They're saying it isn't so productive as to justify the scale of layoffs. But they stll, throughout the article, assert or imply that "AI" is highly productive and increases efficiency.