Technology

This was my immediate thought too. Even people 2-3 levels of management above me struggle to understand our job let alone the person 5-6 levels up in the executive suite.

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.

Seems to be working in Hollywood films for the last 20 years

"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.

The Oncology pharma companies would love that! Every time I google symptoms I swear...

I think that's a little low.

Same. I welcome our AI overlords as long as that means I can just stay at home and fully embrace my autism by not giving a fuck about the workforce while studying all of the thousands of subjects I enjoy learning about.

Not allowed. Work or die, im afraid.

Execs don't give a shit. They simply double down on the false cause fallacy instead. They wouldn't ever admit they fucked up.

Last year the company I work for went through a run of redundancies, claiming AI and system improvements were the cause. Before this point we were growing (slowly) year on year. Just not growing fast enough for the shareholders.

They cut too deep, shit is falling apart, and we're loosing bids to competitors. Now they've doubled down on AI, claiming blindness to the systems issues they created, and just made an employee's "Can Do" attitude a performance goal.

Lets try it. I am willing to start a worker coop headed by votes and an AI. Fuck it.

It's Schrödinger's AI. It is both useless and will replace everyone. Depending on the agenda the particular person is trying to push.

We need to outlaw it.
Train it to replace CEO's.

Oh, there it goes again.

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.

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.

Some of that 59% might, but I guarantee at least some very strongly think it will change things, but think the change it brings will require as many people as before (if not more), but that they will be doing exponentially more with the people they have.

Let's get rid of corporate profits for shareholders. If your actually want to fix the problem. Make it illegal for shareholders to profit more than employees

Missing the point.

AI won't so much replace labor as make it more fungible, and thus exploitable/abusable.

Except where its used as an excuse to just... Not. "Yes we have customer service; its just all chatgpt with no permissions" so nobody can ever return shit that was delivered broken.