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AI will reduce workforce, say 41% of execs in a survey (www.theregister.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 63 points 2 years ago (15 children)

Say execs. You know, the people who view labor as a cost center.

They say that because that’s what they want to happen, not because it’s a good idea.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Freeing humans from toil is a good idea, just like the industrial revolution was. We just need our system to adapt and change with this new reality, AGI and universal basic income means we could live in something like the society in star trek.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (11 children)

    And only 41%.

    I've advised past clients to avoid reducing headcount and instead be looking at how they can scale up productivity.

    It's honestly pretty bizarre to me that so many people think this is going to result in the same amount of work with less people. Maybe in the short term a number of companies will go that way, but not long after they'll be out of business.

    Long term, the companies that are going to survive the coming tides of change are going to be the ones that aggressively do more and try to grow and expand what they do as much as possible.

    Effective monopolies are going out the window, and the diminishing returns of large corporations are going to be going head to head with a legion of new entrants with orders of magnitude more efficiency and ambition.

    This is definitely one of those periods in time where the focus on a quarterly return is going to turn out to be a cyanide pill.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    Yup, and there's a lot you can do to increase productivity:

    • less time wasted in useless meetings - I've been able to cut ours
    • more time off - less burnout means more productivity
    • flexible work schedules - life happens, and I'm a lot more willing to put in the extra effort today if I know I can go home early the next day
    • automate the boring parts - there are some fantastic applications of AI, so introduce them as tools, not replacements
    • profit sharing - if the company does well, don't do layoffs, do bigger bonuses or stock options
    • cut exec pay when times get hard - it may not materially help reduce layoffs, but it certainly helps morale to see your leaders suffering with you

    And so on. Basically, treat your employees with respect and they'll work hard for you.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Short term is all that matters. Business fails? Start another one, and now you have a bunch of people that you made unemployed creating downward pressure on labor prices.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago* (5 children)

    No, you have a lot of people you made unemployed competing with you.

    This is already what's happening in the video game industry. A ton of people have lost their jobs, and VC money has recently come pouring in trying to flip the displaced talent into the next big success.

    And they'll probably do it. A number of the larger publishers are really struggling to succeed with titles that are bombing left and right as a result of poor executive oversight on attempted cash grabs to please the short term market.

    Look at Ubisoft's 5-year stock price.

    Short term is definitely not all that matters, and it's a rude awakening for those that think it's the case.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Mostly the execs don't care. They've extracted "value" in the form of money and got paid, that's the extent if their ability to look forward. The faster they make that happen the faster they can do it again, probably somewhere else. They don't give a single shit what happens after.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    It really depends on the exec.

    Like most people, there's a range.

    Many are certainly unpleasant. But there's also ones that buck the trend.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Yeah, and there are a few good lawyers and a few good cops and (probably) a few good politicians too, but we're not talking about the few exceptions here.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Well, we kind of are as the shitty ones tend to fail after time and the good ones continue to succeed, so in a market that's much more competitive because of a force multiplier on labor unlike anything the world has seen there's not going to be much room for the crappy execs for very long.

    Bad execs are like mosquitos. They thrive in stagnant waters, but as soon as things get moving they tend to reduce in number.

    We've been in a fairly stagnant market since around 2008 for most things with no need for adaptation by large companies.

    The large companies that went out of business recently have pretty much all been from financial mismanagement and not product/market fit like Circuit City or Blockbuster from the last time adaptation was needed with those failing to adapt going out of business.

    The fatalism on Lemmy is fairly exhausting. The past decade shouldn't be used as a reference point for predicting the next decade. The factors playing into each couldn't be more different.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    How do you arrive at effective monopolies are going out the window, squaring it with what we see in the world today which runs counter.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    There's diminishing returns on labor for large companies and an order of magnitude labor multiplier in the process of arriving.

    For example, if you watched this past week's Jon Stewart, you saw an opening segment about the threat of AI taking people's jobs and then a great interview with the head of the FTC talking about how they try to go after monopolistic firms. One of the discussion points was that often when they go up against companies that can hire unlimited lawyers they'll be outmatched by 10:1.

    So the FTC with 1,200 employees can only do so much, and the companies they go up against can hire up to the point of diminishing returns on more legal resources.

    What do you think happens when AI capable of a 10x multipler in productivity at low cost is available for legal tasks? The large companies are already hiring to the point there's not much more benefit to more labor. But the FTC is trying to do as much as they can with a tenth the resources.

    Across pretty much every industry companies or regulators a fraction of the size of effective monopolies are going to be able to go toe to toe with the big guys for deskwork over the coming years.

    Blue collar bottlenecks and physical infrastructure (like Amazon warehouses and trucks) will remain a moat, but for everything else competition against Goliaths is about to get a major power up.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Scaling up productivity is what tends to lead to layoffs. Having the exact same output but with fewer employees is pretty much guaranteed to lower cost and increase profit, so that's what most execs are likely to do. Short-sited maybe, but businesses are explicitly short-sited, only focusing on the next quarter.

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