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.
I’m actually okay with this if it results in fewer duties with the same number of jobs.
There’s an awful lot of stuff in my job that is just tedious busy work. No human ever reads the reports I write, so they might as well not even be written by human either.
I mean we saw this in 2023. Companies fired people and replaced them with AI that was unable to do the job.
I wonder how well an AI would be able to do a CEO’s job? Why not start with the most expensive employee?
I’m pretty sure I could train an AI to make racist jokes at a board meeting. That’s halfway there already.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A quarter of global chief executives expect the deployment of generative artificial intelligence to lead to headcount reductions of at least 5 percent this year, according to a survey unveiled as world and business leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland.
Industries led by media and entertainment, banking, insurance, and logistics were most likely to predict job losses because of cutting-edge AI tools, according to the poll of top directors conducted by PwC ahead of this week’s World Economic Forum.
The findings, based on interviews with 4,702 company chiefs spread across 105 countries, point to the far-reaching impacts that AI models are expected to have on economies and societies, a topic that will feature prominently at the annual meetings.
The PwC survey showed that a rising share of executives envisage strengthening economic growth in 2024, but at the same time are exercised by the need to respond to revolutionary developments including generative AI and climate change.
In the shorter term, the study pointed to receding anxiety about the broader outlook, with less than a quarter of directors reporting that their firm is “highly/extremely” exposed to the threat of inflation, a steep drop from last year’s 40 percent reading.
The findings reflect hopes that the worst of the inflationary upsurge that hit economies from 2021 onwards has now passed, and comes amid investor speculation that central banks led by the US Federal Reserve will start cutting policy rates as soon as this spring.
The original article contains 683 words, the summary contains 240 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Developers: I could use AI to increase my output and productivity while better testing code and coming up with unique ways to speed up runtimes!
CEO: We could do the same output with less people!
I agree with their outlook.
Can we include CEOs as those positions laid off? They don’t do fuck all but save the company money, that can be done by an Excel spreadsheet.
- CEO wastes a ton of money on generative AI
- CEO fires a bunch of people to hit quarterly profit targets
generative AI resulted in job cuts.
Yeah, what’s unfortunate about CEO predictions is that they can kind of just will their expected result into being by acting on it whether it’s sound or not.
Still, I think it’s well past time we started preparing for high surplus labor. We’re already in the early stages of post scarcity, and if we don’t embrace something like socialism, we’re getting more dystopia.
The current AI generation tools, are tools and are still unable to replace people, simply because AI’s do not know all the requirements, do not have the over-all overview, it still makes mistakes (even if you think the code is good or even working), it’s not very creative. AI needs constant instructions as well… So in general I’m not afraid at all of these current AIs. It’s just a tool… like an editor or stackoverflow for support Q&A.
All of those limitations you describe on AI also apply to a lot of humans.
As if AI is trying to replicate the humans behavior. Then again, I still see GenAI as a tool and not as a replacement for humans. Until at some singularity point in time maybe…
I do believe some jobs might disappear, which are jobs nobody really wanted anyway (sorry). But at the same time, new jobs will arise with new technology just like with the the computer, internet, smartphones, etc…
The findings, based on interviews with 4,702 company chiefs spread across 105 countries, point to the far-reaching impacts that AI models are expected to have on economies and societies, a topic that will feature prominently at the annual meetings.
Once you start digging into the article it is quite hysterical what executives think a predictive chat model are going to replace. It reads more like a wish list then anything else.
But they expect AI to replace transportation, Tesla and General Motors are not having any success with this… yet. There appears to be a bandwidth issue that isn’t going to be solved until the US upgrades to fiber.
Boston dynamics are having a lot of success with their robots of late. Everyone else is stuck still getting robots to stack boxes. Which is also having it’s problems with bandwidth. And apparently logic issues.
They also expect things like Energy and power/utilities to be replaced by AI. And that is just dumb. Automation has already swept through the power sector, and AI is not going to help with much else, unless it is going to start repairing power lines, transformers, or the regular substation.
Above all, this is not taking into account the new jobs this also creates. People will need to repair and troubleshoot equipment at multiple layers.
What is also absent from the article is the executive jobs AI will also replace. Once AI can view things at multiple levels. True, you don’t need the average worker anymore. But you don’t need someone that is just collecting a paycheck, do you? If AI will be programed to replace redundancies, then it won’t only find those at lower levels.
Can we start with the CEOs? Pretty sure shatGPT can do their jobs easily
Looks like consulting jobs are going to be well in demand dealing with this type of bullshit from management everywhere.
Reminder: the problem is 100% capitalism, 0% technology. We’ve built a truly perverse economic system in which eliminating labor hurts people.
It hurst people not rich enough to be in the 1% or above. The 1% or above will benefit from it in the short term. In the long term it is going to hurt them as fewer and fewer people will be able to buy their products and services. At least for this quarter it’ll look dynamite.
Capitalism is going to eat itself.
Who’s we? In the country I grew up in, you’d get two years of unemployment benefits (90% of your previous salary), free education and free student support of $1000/month while retraining. This country runs with a surplus and one of the lowest levels of foreign debt and, no, it’s not a financial haven/tax shelter.
It’s about how we structure society - let no one tell you otherwise, capitalism or not.
What country do you live in?
I live in the UK now which is a modern feudal state and more or less a failed state. I grew up in Denmark though, which was the country I was referring to.
I have to say this, if you think UK is a modern feudal and a failed state then ya ain’t seen nothin’ yet!
We have Jack Welch to thank for this trend. It wasn’t always that way.
Or Henry Ford. Heck choose anyone in the Industrial revolution. Thats when this started truly kicking off.
Well, it was Jack Welch who started the braindead “line goes up” trend of making their share price raise by any means, usually layoffs. Before him, people still had jobs for life and were somwhat looked after by their employers. Behind the bastards podcast did a good episode on him.
