RE: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/116226720041425679

Louder for people at the back:

If ‘AI’ gives you a 20% productivity increase, in an economic system that rewards growth at the expense of everything else, the rational thing for any company to do is use that productivity increase to expand into new markets. This may involve some redundancies because you need different skills for the new opportunities but they will be matched by increased hiring in the other areas. If you and your competitors both see a 20% increase in productivity and you use it to make people redundant and they use it to ship more products in more areas, then they will grow at your expense. Their products will be better than yours and you will lose market share.

If you are claiming that you have redundancies because ‘AI’ is increasing productivity, then one of the following is true:

  • Your leadership team does not understand market economics (in which case, investors should worry that the board has not replaced obviously incompetent leadership).
  • You are an unchallengeable monopoly and have already filled all adjacent markets and have literally no possibility of growth (in which case, investors should take note and set their price predictions based on today’s revenue, with no expectation of future growth, which would wipe out over 80% of Meta’s market cap).
  • You are lying about productivity gains (in which case, investors should worry about what else you’re lying about and should start prodding the SEC to investigate).

@david_chisnall

You are leaving out the most likely one: you have overhired in the zero interest / pandemic era and are using AI as a useful cover to hide the fact

@gotofritz I believe this is a special case of 'You are lying about productivity gains'.

@gotofritz @david_chisnall Who knows (not OP).

Your explanation is also what I understand to be correct, but I guess it doesn't sound unpalatable enough to make it to OP's trolling "ha ha you already lost due to my false trichotomy" list.

AI is just the latest and perhaps greatest way to shed staff that management hate, it's not clear yet if it's really possible to thin out the meatbags with it, or the meatbags are still needed to become even more uppity "AI managers".