What has been happening is they use AI to fire 2000 people, but then they want to re-hire 1500 of them as contractors at a higher pay rate… but w/o benefits which greatly reduces costs for the company.
It’s really just being used as leverage to dis-empower labor, esp in sectors where labor is paid ‘too much’. The tech sector massively over-hired and is still over-employed, hence why most of the news you hear is about tech company layoffs, as all their projections on pandemic-level growth ground to a halt once the pandemic was over in 23/24.
And yeah, most of it is media hype, because it freaks people out and gets them anxious and talking and eyes glued to screens and listening to talking heads endlessly bullshit about AI when they know next to nothing about it. For most people AI is a form of magic, like any technology.
And then you have the evangelists and the luddites on either side fanning the flames in their own ways, who claim AI will be mankind’s salvation, or it’s destruction…
Reality is it’s just the next ‘big thing’. it will fade into the background like all the ‘big things’ before it. We’ll have all these data centers doing lots of computing and all it will functionally end up being is just a major upgrade of a computing capacity. The question really is what will we do with it, will it be used productively, or will it just be used to flood the internet with endless bullshit. As if people themselves don’t already produce enough bullshit.
Then again, people’s capacity for consuming bullshit… is pretty infinite as we have seen from the rise of social media, influences, and podcasting. If you told anyone 15 years ago people would spend 8 hours a day listening to weirdos bullshit on the internet, they’d have thought you were nuts.
AI is an excuse to reduce costs.
What has been happening is they use AI to fire 2000 people, but then they want to re-hire 1500 of them as contractors at a higher pay rate… but w/o benefits which greatly reduces costs for the company.
It’s really just being used as leverage to dis-empower labor, esp in sectors where labor is paid ‘too much’. The tech sector massively over-hired and is still over-employed, hence why most of the news you hear is about tech company layoffs, as all their projections on pandemic-level growth ground to a halt once the pandemic was over in 23/24.
And yeah, most of it is media hype, because it freaks people out and gets them anxious and talking and eyes glued to screens and listening to talking heads endlessly bullshit about AI when they know next to nothing about it. For most people AI is a form of magic, like any technology.
And then you have the evangelists and the luddites on either side fanning the flames in their own ways, who claim AI will be mankind’s salvation, or it’s destruction…
Reality is it’s just the next ‘big thing’. it will fade into the background like all the ‘big things’ before it. We’ll have all these data centers doing lots of computing and all it will functionally end up being is just a major upgrade of a computing capacity. The question really is what will we do with it, will it be used productively, or will it just be used to flood the internet with endless bullshit. As if people themselves don’t already produce enough bullshit.
Then again, people’s capacity for consuming bullshit… is pretty infinite as we have seen from the rise of social media, influences, and podcasting. If you told anyone 15 years ago people would spend 8 hours a day listening to weirdos bullshit on the internet, they’d have thought you were nuts.