And last year they were all saying some variation on “don’t worry, AI is not going to cost anyone their jobs.”
Key take away for anyone is to never trust what an executive is saying. Much like a politician, if their lips are moving they are probably lying.
More accurate headline: Stupid CEOs who believe hype about tech they don’t even remotely understand fire a bunch of workers because they don’t think they need them anymore.
These same morons are going to be hiring back most of the people they fired in a year or so after it becomes apparent that none of this is going to work even remotely like they think it will.
For CEOs it’s all about the bottom line. Let’s say a print magazine lays off a bunch of writers and replaced them with AI. Readership will likely drop due to the quality drop and people not buying the magazine on principle. Let’s say it’s a 10% revenue drop, but they already cut costs by 35% with all the layoffs. If they come out as more profitable that’s a win for them.
I mean Amazon gets shittier by the day but continue to grow their margins and market share. Products don’t need to be good to sell, they need to be “good enough”.
This is only true if you ignore all the other variables. Which is, let’s say, another company hiring writers and now they’ll grow their market share in comparison with the shitty AI articles company.
Amazon has a lot of competition in Brazil and the more they make their service worse, the better for the competition. But so far Amazon only raised the bar (with fast deliveries), making all other companies improve their own services.
Amazon already bought that company.
Companies are going to hype up AI then fire some staff to get a stock bump & Management high-fives themselves with bonuses. Weeks later contract offers will come up for some odd title but will be the equivalent of a VBA programmer role to help improve the terrible AI responses.
The cost will go up and some web service company will come out to hype it up as a service. The companies that laid off won’t admit that this was unnecessary. So a consortium of those companies will got to industry events pitching about how this is all Web 4.0 growing pains to give the customer a more “collaborative” delivery mechanism or something buzz-worthy like that.