Mastodawn

Jan Steen Mar 14

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

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).

Antonio Patriarca Mar 14

@david_chisnall I think it is clear to everybody except investors. Or maybe even to them, but they are just waiting for the best moment to get the biggest profit before the bubble explode.

gotofritz Mar 14

@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

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Mar 14

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

gotofritz Mar 14

@david_chisnall

How?

degenerating degenerate Mar 14

@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".

Earsmeardius Mar 14

@david_chisnall Tell me he's not a reptilian.
You can't.

Cody Boone Ferguson Mar 14

@earsmeardius @david_chisnall ah yes. The absurd Babylon Brotherhood conspiracy theory. I can’t check now but there’s a hilarious video on YouTube called something like 7 signs you’re dating a reptile. Some people commenting (when I saw it) were totally taking the absolute piss but iirc some people were dead serious about it. As you would expect the ‘evidence’ can be explained by a lot of things. Obviously. Anyway it’s a hilarious video if you find it.

Cody Boone Ferguson Mar 14

@earsmeardius @david_chisnall it MIGHT be this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6S3e2oj0m6o

Obviously total rubbish.

7 Signs You're Dating a Reptilian Shapeshifter! - Illuminati Alien Reptilian Hybrid Shapeshifters

YouTube

Sandor Spruit 🇪🇺🇳🇱🇺🇦🇨🇦Mar 14

@david_chisnall This time, I wish there was more sarcasm in the toot, but you used it all up in a previous toot - like I said earlier 😬🙄

Torbjörn Norinder Mar 14

@david_chisnall funnily enough this sort of argument would be very familiar to Marxists, since the status of automation as commodity means productivity gains from automation are equally available to market participants, thus leaving labor as the main differentiator

Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦Mar 14

@david_chisnall this, of course, assumes investors are rational.

Which they are not.

And also, I am pretty sure a bunch of investors are doing the "I know this is a scam but I am going to ride it and I am smart enough to exit early when shit starts hitting the fan" dance.

Which, they are also not.

@rysiek @david_chisnall They mistook „never ride the bubble you aren’t blowing yourself” for a call to blow harder.

Cacajao calvus ucayalii Mar 14

@rysiek @david_chisnall
It’s probably easier to explain as class warfare from the billionaire and temporarily embarrassed billionaire classes.
https://catandgirl.com/cat-and-girl-are-power-broke/

@david_chisnall With the funny part being that if current investigation & research continues to be correct, it is mostly №3.

@david_chisnall
Fourth bullet: you don't give a trump about who will buy your product or service.

Does any #nazitech company works on autonomous agentic buyer now? If so whose money this shopping ai agent is meant to spent? Purchasing power of the #protein buyer population diminishes with each wave of layoffs.

Gary Houston Mar 15

@ohir @david_chisnall a fifth would be that you have a cozy relationship with your "competitors", you don't attack their part of the market and they don't attack yours.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Mar 15

@ghouston @ohir

That works in the short term, but only in markets where the barriers to entry are really high. For anything else, it means companies that you don’t think of as competitors (including startups) are now able to start nibbling at the edges.

@david_chisnall @ghouston
No one can compete now, as wannabe competitors were killed by succesful attack on the basic resources: Ram and Flash. Furure supply is now dependent of the core oligopoly will as they bought "options" on its production. Both goals of this operation are achived now. General population will be moved to thin clients, competitors cant start as they are stripped of ability to build infrastructure.

EllenMarch2 Mar 14

@david_chisnall this. Sadly.

canleaf08✅ 加拿大葉子 🏳️‍🌈⚧️🇪🇺🍁Mar 14

@david_chisnall The layoffs in our industry are because datacentre costs not overhiring.

SpaceLifeForm Mar 14

@david_chisnall

The BoD *is* the incompetent leadership.

They only care about their stock portfolio.

You can't fix stupid when the fox is guarding the henhouse.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Mar 15

The two do not follow. If they cared about their portfolio, and were invested in the company, they would encourage behaviour that leads to growth, because that’s what makes the stock value go up over longer periods of time.

SpaceLifeForm Mar 15

@david_chisnall

4 months is a long period of time to these people.

They only think is 3 month chunks.

David Kieffer Mar 15

@david_chisnall Block did the same thing, claiming "layoffs because AI"... turns out they are just lying scumbags too! Appreciate @davidgerard's reporting here: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/09/blocks-ai-layoffs-are-fake-too/

Block’s AI layoffs are fake too

Twitter cofounder and ayahuasca beard weirdo Jack Dorsey has a company called Block that does a useful thing — CashApp — and a lot of stupid stuff with bitcoins and so on. On 26 February, Block ann…

Pivot to AI

Neo Ehproque Mar 15

@dkieffer @david_chisnall @davidgerard

"Block employees are currently expected to send an update email to Dorsey every week"

1st thought: what a monumental waste of time, it's not like he's going to read thousands of emails

Then it follows with he uses AI to summarise them.

Well, want to bet how they write them? May as well ask AI to make the summary up and save everyone a ton of time and frustration

@david_chisnall Stockholders like any story that claims increased efficiency by firing people. It appeals to the irrationality of the market. Plausible deniability beats actual facts. Similar to firing a coach when a sports team is doing bad.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Mar 15

@develin Again, see the recent Goldman Sachs report. Layoffs are now resulting in a 2% drop in share price, a 7% drop if they are labelled ‘restructuring’. The market is irrational only in the short term. The difficulty is in predicting how long it will remain a particular flavour of irrational for. As the saying goes: the market can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent.

Matthew Mamet 4d ago

@david_chisnall The expand into new markets logic is exactly right, and I've lived it. At every consumer marketplace I scaled, a productivity gain meant we could finally go after the adjacent segment we'd been ignoring. The companies using AI as layoff cover are telling you they ran out of ideas before they ran out of people.