Who do these assholes think will buy their products and services when they put the entire workforce out of work? Do they plan to retreat to their bunkers and live out their days underground while the world burns above?
I always ask myself who will buy the products these companies produce if all the workers have been fired. Maybe inflation is just the natural ramp up to McDonald’s charging 5,000 dollars for automated chicken nuggets when there are only billionaire left with money lol.
When it’s cheaper to make the products because you don’t have to pay anyone, people will look at that manufacturer and think… wow I can start a business like that and make an easy profit? Competition will drive down prices.
I think their point is that when everyone’s income is $0/hr price becomes pretty much irrelevant (unless also $0)
There’s one missing piece here, and it’s startup capital. You don’t usually see new chemicals manufacturers for instance, because you need a lot of money to buy everything to start with.
If they gain decent market share, they will be bought by one of the two or three companies that owns the entirety of that manufacturing category. If they don’t, the incumbents will lower prices until the new thing is out of business. In either case, the prices bounce back, and even increase because of “inflation.”
Always be competition if the profit margin is large
Economics of scale. Doesn’t work like that.
Lowering prices to kill competition is kinda illegal, but due to, again, economics of scale they have to lower those to illegal levels. One customer interaction in average brings more profit and less expense with larger scale.
Economics of scale exactly. An industry that is easy to get into(thanks to ai) that has high profit margins will attract competition just like always.
An industry that is easy to get into(thanks to ai)
I don’t know what you mean by that, it doesn’t make anything easier yet and there’s no reason to think it will.
It absolutely makes it easier. It can answer you questions and present the same info large corporations used to have sole access to.
Example would be starting an entertainment content provider. You no longer need artists or writers. It can be a one person show instead of a team of 6.
Architecture firm…fewer designers. Fewer lawyers need hired.
Advertising firm. Fewer employees for sure. More avenues explored than ever possible before.
Biz leaders optimistic it can reduce living, breathing cost centers… er, valued workers
And aggregate demand needed to buy the shit they produce. But that’s not this corpo’s problem. Not until most corpos are doing it.
Can AI replace executives too?
Yes.
The biggest factor in terms of job satisfaction is your boss.
There’s a lot of bad bosses.
AI will be an above average boss before the decade is out.
You do the math.
Yes. And it will.
As soon as we’ve managed to make a computer that can simulate an entire brain in real time. Who knows how many decades or even centuries will that take.
To replace a corporate executive? No, I don’t think so. We already have algorithms more than capable of replacing CEOs. There is nothing that challenging in what they do…
The challenge is to not do whatever the optimal algorithm says. If they simply did what an algorithm says, it would be very easy for competitors to predict.
The challenge comes in being a scapegoat for when things go wrong (albeit a goat with a golden parachute) and a hype man for when things go right.
But as others have said AI won’t replace executives because it’s executives making the decisions to use AI, and no one with power will ever choose an option that reduces their own money.
You make it sound like corporations invent a new revolutionary wheel each quarter. They don’t.
What fantastic new beverage have Coca Cola launched the last couple of years? What astonishing new car technology has GM or Volkswagen released lately?
Most companies are doing what they’ve always have done and guarding their market share. Now and then some small competitor with something revolutionizing pops up and either starts eating market share it gets aquired by one the bigger ones.
So between a competition popping up or one of your engineers coming up with a lucky accident, all you do is to manage the business as you always do.
It’s amazing how this delusion gets repeated so much in here. Absolute unhinged shit.
No. Middle management is a lot of repeating tasks that an AI could do. The thing is that were not talking about replaying all middle management, we’re talking about giving 10% of the managers the tools to run 90% of the repetitive, tedious and boring tasks.
I predict a huge demand of workforce in five years, when they finally realized AI doesn’t drive innovation, but recycles old ideas over and over.
Seems to be working in Hollywood films for the last 20 years
I predict execs will never see this despite you being correct. We replaced most of our HR department with enterprise GPT-4 and now almost all HR inquiries where I work is handled through a bot. It daydreams HR policies and sometimes deletes your PTO days.
But can you convince it to report itself for its violations if you phrase it like it’s a person?
No unfortunately. A lot of us fucked with it but it keeps logs of every conversation and flags abusive ones to management. We all got a stern talking to about it afterwards.
“Trust your tools”. Not my fault the hammer was replaced by a banana.
“Workforce” doesn’t produce innovation, either. It does the labor. AI is great at doing the labor. It excels in mindless, repetitive tasks. AI won’t be replacing the innovators, it will be replacing the desk jockeys that do nothing but update spreadsheets or write code. What I predict we’ll see is the floor dropping out of technical schools that teach the things that AI will be replacing. We are looking at the last generation of code monkeys. People joke about how bad AI is at writing code, but give it the same length of time as a graduate program and see where it is. Hell, ChatGPT has only been around since June of 2020 and that was the beta (just 13 years after the first iPhone, and look how far smartphones have come). There won’t be a huge demand for workforce in 5 years, there will be a huge portion of the population that suddenly won’t have a job. It won’t be like the agricultural or industrial revolution where it takes time to make it’s way around the world, or where this is some demand for artisanal goods. No one wants artisanal spreadsheets, and we are too global now to not outsource our work to the lowest bidder with the highest thread count. It will happen nearly overnight, and if the world’s governments aren’t prepared, we’ll see an unemployment crisis like never before. We’re still in “Fuck around.” “Find out” is just around the corner, though.
You know what I like about Pareto law and all the “divide and conquer” algorithms? You should still know where the division is and which 10% are more important than the other 90%.
Anyway, my job is in learning new stuff quickly and fixing that. Like of many-many people, even some non-technical types really.
People who can be replaced with machines have already been for the most part, and where they can’t, it’s also a matter of social pressure. Mercantilism and protectionism and guilds historically were defending the interests of certain parties, with force too.
No, I don’t think there’ll be a sudden “find out” different from any other period of history.
I’ve worked with humans, who have computer science degrees and 20 years of experience, and some of them have trouble writing good code and debugging issues, communicating properly, integrating with other teams / components.
I don’t see “AI” doing this. At least not these LLM models everyone is calling AI today.
Once we get to Data from Star Trek levels, then I can see it. But this is not that. This is not even close to that.
Even mindless and repetitive tasks require instances of problem solving far beyond what a.i is capable of. In order to replace 41% of the work force you’ll need a.g.i and we don’t know if thats even possible.
Let’s also not forget that execs are horrible at estimating work.
“Oh this’ll just be a copy paste job right?” No you idiot this is a completely different system and because of xyz we can’t just copy everything we did on a different project.
Its not replacing people outright its meaning each person is capable of doing more work each thus we only need 41% the people to achieve the same task. It will crash the job market. Global productivity and production will improve then ai will be updated repeat. Its just a matter of if we can scale industry to match the total production capacity of people with ai assistance fast enough to keep up. Both these things are currently exponential but the lag may cause a huge unemployment crisis in the meantime.
In this potential scenario, instead of axing 41% of people from the workforce, we should all get 41% of our lives back. Productivity and pay stay the same while the benefits go to the people instead of the corporations for a change. I know that’s not how it ever works, but we can keep pushing the discussion in that direction.
You and I know damn well that a revolution is the only way that’s gonna happen, and there aren’t any on the horizon.
What do u replace it with after a revolution? Communism doesnt work capitalism is flawed democracy is flawed but seems to at least promote our freedoms. I think we defiantly need a fluid democracy before we can start thinking about how we solve the economic problems (well other than raising minimum wage that’s a no brainer) without undermining exponential growth.
It was 41% of execs saying workforce will be replaced, not 41% of workforce will be replaced
We are walking talking general intelligence so we know it’s possible for them to exist, the question is more if we can implement one using existing computational technology.
Hype hype hype hype hype.
Hilarious L take
You know what I love about blocking people?
Hahahaha, good one
but recycles old ideas over and over.
I am so glad us humans don’t do that. It’s so nice going to a movie theater and seeing a truly original plot.
these are the same people who continue to use monetary incentives despite hard scientific evidence that it has the opposite effect from what is desired. they’re not gonna realise shit.
The ones refusing to give raises and also being shocked and complain bitterly about loyalty when people quit for a higher wage somewhere else.
Yeah the 59% in this survey are going to end up pretty successful and buy out the 41%
And that means lower prices for consumers. Right? Guys… r… right?
And that means lower prices for consumers. Right? Guys… r… right?
No, but it does mean 41%fewer people can afford to buy these companies products, you cheapass shortsighted corporate fucks.
41% is the number of executives that think AI will reduce their work force, not the number of jobs they expect to replace.
Your point stands though.
ITT: bunch of people who have no idea what AI even means
This is kind of like the early days of computers or internet all over again. LLMs is not what educated people mean when they’re talking about AI. ChatGPT is not going to take your jobs, AGI will. Nobody just knows when. Might be next year or it might take 2 decades.
Enlighten us, oh knowledgeable one, what is AI?
This is why not every business is successful I guess
And as a result the remaining workforce will have to work more.
Eventually the entire economy will be just one overworked australian man.
Quiet, mate. Pulling the empty carts is the closest thing we get to sleep.
Can’t wait for AI to replace all those useless execs and CEOs. It’s not like they even do much anyways, except fondling their stocks. They could probably be automated by a markov chain
If they could replace project managers that would be nice. In theory it is an important job, but in practice it’s just done by someone’s mate who was most productive when they don’t actually turn up.
The Paranoia RPG has a very realistic way of determining who gets to be the leader of a group. First, you pick who’ll do what kind of job (electronics, brute force, etc). Whoever didn’t get picked becomes the leader, as that person is too dumb to do anything useful.
Yes that’s quite a funny and satirical way of doing it but it’s probably not actually the best way in real life.
I think Boeing have proven this quite nicely for everyone, the company was much better off when they had actual engineers in charge. When they got corporate paper pushes everything went downhill.
I swear people don’t know the difference between a good project manager and a bad one, or no one.
Everyone on here is on about how the.board has no idea what the bottom rungs of the ladder do and are all “haha they are so stupid they think we do nothing”. Then in the next sentence say they don’t know what the board does and that they just do nothing.
Project managers on board members what the hell you want about
People slagging off jobs they don’t understand.
Both project managers that they probably have experience with dealing with but don’t understand and board members they probably don’t have any experience with and also don’t understand.
Board members don’t do shit
I see.
What is this judgment based on?
Don’t get a job in government contracting. Pretty much I do the work and around 5 people have suggestions. None of whom I can tell to fuck off directly.
Submit the drawing. Get asked to make a change to align with a spec. Point out that we took exception to the spec during bid. Get asked to make the change anyway. Make the change. Get asked to make another change by someone higher up the chain of five. Point out change will add delays and cost. Told to do it anyway. Make the next change…
Meanwhile every social scientist “we don’t know what is causing cost disease”
So, when am I gonna see some of all that UBI?
Hahahahahaha…
It’s cheaper if we starve to death.
It’ll reduce the workforce from well-remunerated professionals who perform tasks to a larger number of disposable minimum-wage labourers who clean up botshit.
Pretty sure the entire Republican party and the ruling class they serve just orgasmed at that thought.
“41% of execs display anomalous sexual prowess, 9” dongs thought to play a role.”
Execs? The same people who make short sighted decisions and don’t understand basic psychology? Let me go get a pen so I won’t…give two fucks what this bogus survey says. Let AI run your business so I can have some excitement in my life
They don’t care. Jack Welch’s ghost must be fed by destroying more companies for short term gain.
Bye bye middle management!
But seriously, work will always expand to the available workforce. That’s why there are so many stupid industries. They always tank during a resession, but other industries will expand to use excess labor.
