IBM To Pause Hiring In Plan To Replace 7,800 Jobs With AI 129
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg that it expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by AI in the coming years. Reuters reports: Hiring specifically in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years. The reduction could include not replacing roles vacated by attrition, the PC-maker told the publication.
This is it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Demanding things from others works for women in human societies, because women offer inherent value with their ability to produce human life.
Men have no inherent value and must generate value through their actions. So they can demand all they want. They will get nothing. This is generally correct across cultures and development stages of humanity.
In case you ever wondered why things where men and women come to argue about division of resources, like divorce courts today, society always takes away from men a
Re: This is it. (Score:2)
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Visarga below explains why there's a clear cut (and what I thought self evident but apparently not for some) inherent asymmetry in sexual reproduction. Remember, value resides in the element that constrains, not in the element that is abundant. This is the universal for all supply and demand.
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What the fuck did I just read? Some weird abstract about opening the borders to get more IceIreLand babies?
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>And historically, babies are basically a defective product.
I was reading in wonder until this line, asking myself "is this an elaborate joke, because it sure sounds like one. A solution is to just do what I define as the equivalent of stealing productive people from others to fill our lack of birthrate, because those other people will totally become just like us". I mean you literally did define it as an example in your own post!
And then you went for the line quoted, and it clicked. You understand nothi
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Demanding things from others works for women in human societies, because women offer inherent value with their ability to produce human life.
It's sorta funny you ascribe some inherent value to human life when discussing the possibility of AI taking things over. They get a foothold in bigger businesses, the power grab we'll build into them, because ultimately that's what we want them to do, will eventually be our downfall. What appears to the executives to be a fine digital pet on the world's tightest leash, lest it dare to think they were replaceable, will eventually become the big decision makers because it'll be cheaper than paying a human. An
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You're confusing ML AI and AGI. ML AI inherently cannot "take over" because it has no self awareness. Self awareness is necessary for abstract thinking of the kind necessary for "taking over".
And we're strictly talking about ML AI like chatGPT. Not a hypothetical AGI that we have no idea how to build.
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You're confusing ML AI and AGI. ML AI inherently cannot "take over" because it has no self awareness. Self awareness is necessary for abstract thinking of the kind necessary for "taking over".
And we're strictly talking about ML AI like chatGPT. Not a hypothetical AGI that we have no idea how to build.
As I've been saying over and over again, we're not much gonna care what version of AI it is when it's making all our decisions for us because some yahoo in the C-suites decided it was more profitable than letting humans decide. That climb upwards doesn't have to be self-actuated by the AI itself. We're plenty stupid enough to push it to the top out of sheer greed.
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This is not a "versioning" issue. This is an apples to tractors comparison issue.
ML AI has little to nothing in common with AGI. About the only similarity is that they're both likely going to be ran on complex modern chips, just like both apple trees and tractors are on planet's surface.
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You're not real good at conversation, are you? I'm not, even a little bit, talking about what you seem to be yammering away about. Us being dumb enough to put these things in charge has nothing to do with "versioning." It has to do with our own stupidity and the dumbass "worship the machines as the new god" shit we see happening right now everywhere from the media to the c-suites to the dipshits on this site constantly babbling about how the computers will all save us from ourselves. If you're not seeing th
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No matter how much you worship a wrench, it's not going to take over the world.
P.S. Projection much?
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ML AI inherently cannot "take over" because it has no self awareness
For this, selfhood is unnecessary. Awareness is unnecessary. Self awareness is doubly unnecessary. You think viruses have selves, awareness, self awareness?
If you're trying to think original thoughts, run a critical loop that tries to justify them.
Not a hypothetical AGI that we have no idea how to build.
Speak for yourself. You don't have any idea what researchers on the frontier are up to.
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I do though. AI theory has been worked out and stayed largely stagnant since 1960s. With much of hypotheses being worked out back in 1930s. It's not cutting edge. The problem is that ML AI is not really AI. It's instead a simple pattern recognition machine. It's basically about throwing a massive amount of computational power combined with better understanding of matrices (as a mathematical concept) to effectively brute force pattern recognition on a much wider scale. That is the current breakthrough of ML
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And developing more complex ML AI doesn't bring us meaningfully closer to AGI.
...And this requires self awareness.
These statements don't cohere. They don't come from a chain of justification and implication. They make huge leaps without connection. Going to invoke Hitch's Law here, as it's your burden to demonstrate something concrete.
Here are my justifiable, concrete observations. ML has indeed brought us much closer to AGI, f
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Theory of AI. Not practical applications. You know how we work out the mathematics first, and then we do complex application of mathematics and not the other way around?
With AI, there were two major waves. First was in early 1900s, mostly focused around the novel concepts opened up by rapidity of industrialization. Second was in the early Cold War, when AI was a massive military game changer. Both quickly realized that we have no idea how to make a self aware AI. As in we do not know how to begin making one
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Aren't you backwards? At least in primitive cultures. There's always another women but if the hunter dies, so does the family. The Inuit for example had an hierarchy of who gets sacrificed when things were bad. First the old people, as they weren't very productive, then the children, starting with the youngest, as they were replaceable, then the wife as there were always more women, with the man being last as he was needed to provide for the new family.
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"Hunter" is someone who's value is linked to his ability to hunt. It's not a gender. It's a profession.
"Woman" however is someone with ability to produce life. Woman is also a gender.
It's in your own text. Man's value comes from what he provides. Woman's value is in her ability to create life. This is why you had to jury rig the comparison from "sex to sex" to "profession to sex".
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I see you're having another one of those "moments of missing points to hammer downvotes on the posts of that guy I'm stalking for two years on slashdot, so I'll just spam nonsense on every recent post he made instead".
Do continue. I still find it hilarious how you're feeding my ego with this idiocy, and not even realizing it.
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Jordanian? Jordan may be one of the sources of modern humanity, being in a valley of those key rivers in the Middle East, but this is agnostic of location.
You don't even understand in your idiotic claim of "50 years or so" that until invention of modern plumbing and medicine, women couldn't really work all that hard. Being pregnant saps strength and stamina, things that women already are in a severe shortage of compared to men because they have to operate on about a 1/20th of testesterone that men operate o
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Yes. This is why to this day, being a barren woman is extremely stigmatizing for women. They lose most of their inherent value when labelled as such, and in spite of all the flowery speeches, people around them change their treatment of such women when they find out. Whereas being an infertile man means a much smaller status hit for men, because their value isn't provided by their ability to seed women, but by their ability to produce value for women. And being fertile is only a small part of it.
One of most
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>Men generally have more money and earning potential. there's just more money to take.
What drives men to have more money?
If you ever watch those modern tiktoks of women and what they want in a man, they're extremely unified. They want a provider man, so woman can work if she wants, or stay home if she wants. She wants someone who makes more money than her so that if she decides to stop working, her lifestyle (read: status) doesn't take a hit. And she wants a tall man and she doesn't know why. So the main
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So sexism is a good thing as it drives men to success?
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Woof!
Re: You motherfuckers wanted computers. Well guess (Score:1)
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Idea: Audit the automation and surtax it (Score:5, Interesting)
Each company should be required to estimate what percent of its productivity and revenue is produced via automation. There can be external audits to check this.
Then an "automated economy" surtax is added to corporate income tax based on that.
This can be used to fund some kind of guaranteed annual income for the un/under-employed.
Then we can all pursue our highest purpose/addiction without having to work for "the man".
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Corporations don't pay taxes. They just add the taxes to their cost structure and pass it along to their customers. Since all corporations in a vertical pay the same tax, the increased cost has no impact on their bottom line but does impact down stream to the end user consumer which is usually you.
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By this logic no one pays taxes, since it's always passed on to the next one. Your taxes for example would be paid by your employer, workers at companies who's stock you own and so on.
The entire concept of velocity of capital is that money keeps changing hands, and that is how economic activity is generated. There's no "final destination" for money.
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I assure you that normal people don't have brake lights on their assholes.
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Yes, and gravity pulls people away from objects of high mass. Also black is white.
Re:Idea: Audit the automation and surtax it (Score:5, Informative)
Corporations don't pay taxes. They just add the taxes to their cost structure and pass it along to their customers. Since all corporations in a vertical pay the same tax, the increased cost has no impact on their bottom line but does impact down stream to the end user consumer which is usually you.
This is all just corporate propaganda and PR; it has no basis in reality. Corporate taxes to not drive consumer prices [oregonconsumerleague.org].
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Quoting the "Oregon Consumer League" on a topic like this is a bit like asking the tobacco companies if their products cause cancer.
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regardless of everything else I have to ask this: why do you believe you should have the power to steal from someone because they are so productive, they produce with little labor? Farming is done with very few hands today for example, should people just steal from farmers? Who or what should give the power to steal legally from the productive classes?
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regardless of everything else I have to ask this: why do you believe you should have the power to steal from someone because they are so productive, they produce with little labor?
This is easy: because he thinks it will produce a better society. That is the basis of literally every law ever created by a free society. You can debate whether you agree the society created by such a system is "better", but you're question is just silly.
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That is not the question that I asked. I didn't ask about his motivations (and I reject that building society on top of theft is a better way, but that is beside the point).
The question is what power will give him the ability to steal from the productive class?
Lets say the productive class doesn't just produce food but also manufactures weapons and can effectively afford a man force to apply these weapons. When a member of the unproductive class decides he wants to steal from a member of the productive cl
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That is not the question that I asked.
You asked why the GP believe he should have the power to do XYZ. I said he believes he, and likeminded people, should have that power because they believe it will create a better society. This is why average citizens should be granted this power. That is exactly answering the question you posed.
A democracy (or democratic republic) is built upon the belief that average citizens should be granted this level of power. We collectively decide the society we want to live in, not just the nobility (in the US subst
Re: Idea: Audit the automation and surtax it (Score:2)
They also skipped over how some of the owning class are willing to give because even they believe it is the right thing to do to support others, and/or because they see the way government spends their taxes as serving their self-interest. (Enforcing contracts! Building roads! Educating workers! Etc.) So, the owning class pay for a cascade of reasons - morality, self-interest, the social contract stuff you mentioned, and only lacking those do they pay under duress. As Luckyo noted, some of these latter do lo
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MegaCorporateFarmers that have the staff to research and apply for these handouts and subsidies. Old school smaller family farms, not so much.
Re:Taxation considered theft (Score:2)
Side-note: capitalism and private enterprise (Score:2)
However, it must be noted that this is only made possible (at least in a sustainable, stable way) within a framework of constraints (rules), and conventions which are laid down by the society as a whole and institutionalized and enforced via the unitary hierarchical governance structure. In other words, market-based "free" enterprise is never really f
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This is not my original idea. But it may be time to resurrect the concept. Each company should be required to estimate what percent of its productivity and revenue is produced via automation. There can be external audits to check this. Then an "automated economy" surtax is added to corporate income tax based on that. This can be used to fund some kind of guaranteed annual income for the un/under-employed. Then we can all pursue our highest purpose/addiction without having to work for "the man".
It's a fascinating thought, that won't fly even a little in our current world. At least, not in the world those of us living in the United States of America live in. Corporations rape and pillage and get government handouts when they start to shrink a bit. Commoners, workers, normal people? Get told to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and try harder. That's not going to change just because jobs are taken away.
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We have been doing that for 200 years now. IBM has been doing it for over a century at this point. So don't be deceived by the hype.
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If the history of automation is anything to go by I see the following...
1. In a few years they ditch AI, and go back to how they had it before, because AI didn't work as well as planned. (Much like the fully automated auto industry)
2. AI will allow the company to grow, with its growth it ends up hiring more employees partially to keep the AI systems running, but mostly to do things that the AI cannot, either due to mobility reasons, needs adaptability, or needs to connect to people on a more emotional level
Re: This is it. (Score:2)
Simply referring to humans as resources is already (Score:5, Insightful)
dehumanizing. This doesn't surprise me at all.
Considering the headlong rush for chatgpt bullshit, despite inaccuracies and pure data fabrication, I await the lawsuits with bated breath - you know, until the courts are full of AI too, Futurama style (at least maybe we get suicide booths, right?).
Re:Simply referring to humans as resources is alre (Score:5, Funny)
They're mostly replacing HR for now, that's not going to have much of an impact on dehumanizing.
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It's not mimicking, it's modelling. Each prediction of a next token, or masked part of an image, is a miniature, falsifiable experiment. The prediction of which requires causal models of its domain which it can reapply in context.
On tech fads, predicting equal outcomes from loose past correlations - that doesn't work. This universe isn't that linear.
After all, it is merely trained on whatever creativity is available from us humans.
Merely lol. You're trying to paint a box around AI's capabilities, but you are wide of the mark with this argument. Humans
Re:Simply referring to humans as resources is alre (Score:4, Interesting)
The exact opposite. When you produce something, humans are a resource. Always have been, from before we invented fire. If you need to set up a hunt, you have hunters as a limited resource to be put in places where they will be put to run down the prey animal. If you can't see your hunters as resources, your hunt fails and everyone starves.
So those that didn't know how to calculate human work as a resource didn't survive even to the point of learning how to make fire.
Most of our evolution is driven by this concept. There's nothing more human than being a useful resource to other humans. It takes a deeply religiously indoctrinated mind to think otherwise.
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Lick that boot all you want, you'll still be looked on as disposable by the corporations that you admire so much.
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Is it so shocking to you to figure out that when you set up a hunt, you actually have to figure out where your hunters have to be placed because they're a limited resource? Even today with domesticated dogs and firearms doing most of the driving and killing the prey, rather than having to run down prey animal into exhaustion with a spear in your hands through three or four pre-set ambushes until the four-legged prey is exhausted and can be killed with a spear in melee.
It has nothing to do with boot licking.
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You mean the Russians who just before that had a civil war with so many different parties fighting each other, that a lot of modern political movements literally got their start from a specific group of rebels?
Have you tried ever looking into history instead of just thinking that "history = memes".
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What does it take to live without a job? We need food, housing, energy, and so many things. But we can cultivate food, build houses, and construct our energy infra with our own hands. That means we need less UBI/help and at the same time we get more control over what we h
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Thank you for using Stop-and-Drop!
The HRBot2000(TM)! (Score:3)
Coming up with ways to be offended by casual office banter and the normal spectrum of subjective opinions with machine precision and lightning speed!
IBM still has 7,800 employees? (Score:1)
They are all sent through the pod bay door.
Canâ(TM)t wait until the CEO is replaced (Score:2)
Does make it clear what quality IBM people are (Score:2)
Now does it?
IBM leading the race to the bottom (Score:5, Interesting)
IBM was one of the first big companies to fully embrace offshoring (India Business Machines). This led directly to lower salaries for US workers and lower hourly rates for contractors.
Concluding that they have not gone far enough, they are now looking to replace 8,000 back office workers with AI. With any luck they will be able to replace ALL workers with Chat Bots. All except the executives of course.
We should have formed labor unions for white collar workers when we had the chance. Now it's too late. I'm close enough to retirement now that none of this will effect me personally but if I were a 30 year old programmer I would be looking to retrain as an electrician or plumber. Seriously.
Re:IBM leading the race to the bottom (Score:5)
Fuck IBM. They're a dinosaur company anyway. This plan will blow up on them just like everything else they've "innovated" within the past 3 decades.
Re:IBM leading the race to the bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
Couldn't agree with you more. Fuck IBM indeed.
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if I were a 30 year old programmer I would be looking to retrain as an electrician or plumber. Seriously.
If all these gloom and doom predictions come true, those jobs won't be any safer. Once tens of millions of people flood into the trades the wages there will take a nose dive too.
If we go through a long period where jobs are disappearing at a much faster rate than new jobs are being created, no job will be safe. The only relative safety will come from being one of the best in your field, so if you are an above average programmer you are likely much safer staying in that career than moving to the trades. Even
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To be fair, there will be new jobs created from AI. Just like we saw new jobs created at other points in time during the technology evolution.
I think if you know how to create AI tools you will be fine. But if you are a Java programmer or a C programmer it won't be long before ChatGPT, or something similar to it, will be able to churn out acceptable level code in those and other languages.
To your point, if you are an exceptionally good programmer there will be work available. But most people are not at thos
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The point of using new tools is to increase productivity. If you create MORE net jobs, then it's not a benefit unless you offset that overhead with more gains than if you didn't do anything different. IT people support the tech and they are worth the overhead if they produce more in the end... and they do. One IT support person making sure your 100s of bots work...actually not even one IT support person; a remote service having 1 IT person supporting 1000s bots themselves with their own tools to help them
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This does not make sense. What do people do when we get a capability increase? We revise our goals. We aim higher, we don't go home. It is not a zero sum game. We have so many things to improve even now, and there will always be work while we have things to improve.
AI, if it ever gets so smart, will just need to include humans in its plans. Why would it ignore such
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So? (Score:2)
I don't use IBM anyway. And now I never would. At least it will be easy to blame something if it doesn't work out.
Brawndo Layoffs (Score:3)
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PC maker? (Score:5, Funny)
the PC-maker told the publication.
Did chatGPT write this or just a clueless meatbag at Reuters/Bloomberg/Slashdot?
Sell your IBM stock (Score:2)
This is ridiculous shit from a CEO who apparently has no idea what AI or is capable of.
30%? Idiot.
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There are already people who work multiple jobs using remote work and chatGPT. You can find quite a few stories about them if you look. It's all about not being an idiot and trying to jury rig AI to do entirety of work, and instead integrating it into your work flow so you can do several times the work that you used to be able to. I.e. use AI as a force multiplier tool, rather than try to pretend that it's full automation and then go pikachu face because it makes mistakes.
At which point your less productive
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Yes, I had a new employee who was previously a contractor/consultant. I asked him directly during interview if he was ready to go FTE and drop his consulting clients. He said yes.
He then proceeded to fuckup his first project and got caught lying about it. He had 8+ tiny font shells on screen at all times he had to squint and lean forward to see. I couldn't see what was on his screen but it wasn't my work. What I assigned him could have easily been done in 2 windows.
What was he doing? After I fired him
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You n=1 demonstrates that some people fail at their jobs. Tell me, what's value of n for programmers failing at their jobs?
Because whatever it will be for AI, it will likely be lower after a few years of focused training. Programming is an algorithmic job with minimal need for self awareness, and that's something ML AI definitionally is better than humans.
Totally unrelated:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Falle... [reddit.com]
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Are you upset I used an anecdote? Perhaps I should have commissioned a study?
Programming requires intelligence. Coding requires minimal intelligence.
Do you think every programming project comes fully specified for all edge cases? And never changes along the way?
As of now and for the foreseeable future, successful programming projects of any complexity worth discussing will _require_ humans to write them. They may use an LLM like gpt to help crank out shit library like code but nothing important will be
It's OK Luckyo I got this. (Score:1)
See. Like I said. AI will be a force multiplier and allow the human to do the creative part of the job.
Look. I just saved Luckyo from having to write out 5+ paragraphs with only 1 line.
See how much more efficient humans are compared to LuckyoGPT.
Add in some insults and an anecdote about "painting rocks by hand" for the full Luckyo experience.
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Wait, you used anecdote, and I answered it with one, just much better documented and more relevant. How did you go from that to "you must be angry I used an anecdote"?
Are you projecting something?
>As of now and for the foreseeable future, successful programming projects of any complexity worth discussing will _require_ humans to write them.
Just like a year before spreadsheet software hit the market, "as of now and for the foreseeable future, successful accounting projects of any complexity worth discussi
It's taken them a while... (Score:1)
Next news: IBM outsources AI to India (Score:4, Funny)
white shirts and black ties (Score:2)
Remember when IBM's company motto was "THINK"?
Aw, that thinking is for chumps. We've got predictive text matrices now!
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I worked for ibm in the 80s. that was when they were still making pc's. By then they were already totally ossified and nothing could be done without a million idiots signing off on it, so basically not that much got done. But thankfully we did not have to wear ties and white shirts in research.
The pc maker? (Score:4, Informative)
We're too late.. (Score:3)
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This will be a big problem for society as more and more jobs will be replaced by AI and robots real soon.
There are already millions (in America alone) who are unable to find useful employment. We are doing nothing for them. What do you think will be done for you when these computer models make you redundant?
I don't think you have any appreciation for how dire it will be once the clear-cutting of America is complete. There will be hundreds of millions of people desperate for food and shelter instead of the millions that are suffering now.
The AI is weak (Score:3)
AI seems to have a glaring weakness; it's not creative. Ask it to draw an apple riding a horse and it probably will. But ask it to draw a well designed mobile phone form page for a user account and it can't. Even ask it to show you a nice login page with background and it can't. Unless you give it the exact objects to draw in the page it can't gather requirements or understand what is required in a situation.
I suspect this will turn out like automated driving. The first 80% is 20% of the work and the last 20% is 80% of the work. They've only done 20% of the work, but it is that last part that will make it truly useful and it will be a long time before it is there.
haha. replace ibm. (Score:2)
haha. i long since replaced ibm with ai. no problem.
Typical IBM (Score:2)
Always trying to get out in front of a parade that's already left - and never succeeding.
WTF (Score:2)
IBM, the PC-maker? Looks like the journalist was already replaced by 90's Clippy