AI Seen Cutting Worker Numbers, Survey By Staffing Company Shows (reuters.com) 89
AI will lead to many companies employing fewer people in the next five years, staffing provider Adecco Group said on Friday, in a new survey highlighting the upheaval AI will bring to the workplace. From a report: Some 41% of senior executives expect to have smaller workforces because of AI technology, Adecco said in a report based on a survey of executives at 2,000 large companies worldwide. Generative AI, which can create text, photos and videos in response to open-ended prompts, has spurred both hope it could eliminate repetitive tasks and fear it will make some jobs obsolete. [...] The Adecco survey is one of the largest into the AI topic, and follows a 2023 World Economic Forum study which said 25% of companies expected AI to trigger job losses, while 50% expected the technology to create new roles.
Totally unsurprising (Score:2)
Lots of human output for business is barely AI quality anyway. If a job is at that threshold, nobody's going to hire for it any more. If a job is slightly above that, you're going to see one person in an editor role curating AI product and replacing what would have been several people previously.
And that's not counting the over-enthusiasm for cost savings that will have people replaced even where AI isn't quite ready yet.
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Most of the needs for "mass, low quality labor" have already been outsourced to lower-waged countries*. Thus, I expect AI to impact already-outsourced tasks more than "direct" workers.
* Nothing personal against these countries, that's just how US bosses viewed them, for good or bad. They wanted what they perceived as the "key work" done under their own eyeballs. AI is not ready to do most of that yet.
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Uh, huh. And when they come for *your* job... but you don't think of yourself as a "worker".
Re:Totally unsurprising (Score:4, Insightful)
What does that have to do with my job? None of us are so special we can't be replaced, it's just a matter of how long we have before there is an AI that is good enough to make it happen.
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I disagree. I have the good fortune to have skills that will not be accessible to AI anytime soon and maybe never. Replacing me is exceptionally hard. In fact, all my curent jobs are situations were the people that asked me were quite happy to find somebody that could work for them part-time because they urgently needed to replace somebody that left and could not find anybody qualified. (There is a tendency to ask me to stay even when they finally get somebody full time, so I am not worried at all.) I know
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>I have the good fortune to have skills that will not be accessible to AI anytime soon and maybe never.
Well, I suppose it might take longer than your remaining lifespan and so for you that's "maybe never". That won't be true for future generations, it's just a matter of time.
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Well that's the magic of being arbitrary. It doesn't have to be connected to your job, nor does it have to make sense. Out you go, with a year of french kissing ATS firewalls to look forward to.
None of us are so special we can't be replaced
Good. Then let's stop fucking around and wipe out the labor force now. Get it over with. This salacious, quasi-sexual "it's gonna get youuuuuu" shit is not only tiresome, it's more than a little weird.
it's just a matter of how long we have before there is an AI that is good enough to make it happen.
Two hundred million starving people with nothing to lose. Sounds like a winner to me. Why don't you ask ChatGPT wha
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Soo, you consider pointing out an obvious, upcoming problem "wrong" somehow? How stupid can you be?
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And that is just it: No good engineer or STEM graduate will ever be replaced by AI. But a low-level paper pusher or run-of-the-mill economics graduate may well be. Often that will take the same form as robots at an Amazon warehouse, i.e. instead of 10 workers, you now have 9 robots and one worker supervising them and 1% of a robotics engineer doing the programming and maintenance.
As many (most?) people are not smart and never learned any solid skills in their lives, many jobs are threatened. Because AI does
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And that is just it: No good engineer or STEM graduate will ever be replaced by AI.
Horseshit. They already have.
instead of 10 workers, you now have 9 robots and one worker supervising them and 1% of a robotics engineer doing the programming and maintenance.
And nine hungry people standing in the parking lot staring at the only employee as he fumbles with his car keys and tries not to pee on himself.
As many (most?) people are not smart and never learned any solid skills in their lives
Name five solid skills. I'll make it easier. Name ONE solid skill I can put on a resume that will guarantee me an interview.
Because I can name ten things that will guarantee I have to send out 1000 more resumes.
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Well. You are obviously pissed at something in this context, but that, also obviously, does not give you any insight into the problem.
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I'll just jump in here real quick to point out you avoided the question about "solid skills," which is a tacit admission that hiring managers are completely arbitrary in their insistence every candidate possess skills none of them can name.
Further proof that employment is adult daycare and that managers are being paid more to guess. /thread
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Naa, I just do not think this is a consulting job were I have to deliver all the answers. Does not mean I could not. The thing about "solid skills" though is that you usually do not have to deal with hiring managers when you have them. Well, admittedly I do not really know what hiring managers do. The closest to dealing with somebody that was probably also a hiring manager was when a large corporate customer asked for a lower hourly rate. My response was "no", the project lead asked me to wait outside and 5
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Naa, I just do not think this is a consulting job were I have to deliver all the answers.
Sometimes the QB scrambles for 40 yards and still ends up second and 15.
The thing about "solid skills" though is that you usually do not have to deal with hiring managers when you have them.
That's the theory. I walked into an interview one time (having done some research on the company) and politely informed the interviewer there was no job in the building I couldn't do with a couple weeks training.
He threw C++ at me, which I presumed was his universal disqualifier meant to take candidates down a peg. I proceeded to describe the entire history of the language to him going all the way back to the design principles of UNIX f
time to lower the full time hours and add OT X2 / (Score:3)
time to lower the full time hours and add OT X2 / X2.5 levels.
Out side the usa some places start OT at 35 hours.
In the usa maybe lower full time to 35-32 hours and add an X2 level at 50-60 and X2.5 at 60+
And set the Minimum Salary level to like $50K + COL
Some places like CA have it at $115,763.35 for some jobs to be Salary with no OT pay.
As I see AI cutting jobs and the few people left need to work OT to fill the gaps. When you go form say an job having 10 people going down to 2-3 people (with OT and limited time off to have full coverage)
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Some places like CA have it at $115,763.35 for some jobs to be Salary with no OT pay.
If by CA you mean Canada (I guess you probably meant California, but here's some words anyways), it varies by province, but where I live, what matters isn't actually the dollar value of the salary, but if you are considered a "manager" (and not just that it's in your title, you need to be in a position to, broadly speaking, hire / fire / make decisions on your own authority for the company, etc.) If you're "salaried" but not a manager, you're still entitled to OT. (disclaimer, I'm not a lawyer).
this is a great idea (Score:2)
With the cost of automation falling - lets raise the cost of labor
What could go wrong
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The apocalypse hasn't arrived just yet. There's a LOT of hype about this, and I do think AI will make people more productive. But it's a bit early to jump to the conclusion that we'll be sitting on our hands before you know it.
Self-driving cars have been around for what, 20 years now? Have they put all the Uber drivers out of work? Hardly, and that possibility is still a very long way off.
If your job can be automated by AI, it's probably long-overdue, and you probably hate your job already.
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Self-driving cars have been around for what, 20 years now?
No. They are just becoming fit for purpose now. That you think they existed decades ago calls into question pretty much everything you say.
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I would argue that AI is about as fit for prime time, as self-driving cars were 20 years ago. The first commercial self-driving vehicle went into service in the 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Yes, it had very limited capability and certainly wasn't a general-purpose self-driving vehicle. But the same could be said of AI today. AI can handle some interesting use cases. But it needs constant supervision and retraining. It tends to work best in specific niches, such as GitHub Copilot (programming) or
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Yes. And today's AI is likewise impressive, but incredibly limited.
If you are asking ChatGPT questions that have no real consequence, it's amazing, kind of like parlor tricks are amazing. It can rattle off ideas for road trips in New Mexico, for example, and might even come up with some things you wouldn't have thought of yourself.
But for anything that *has to be correct* LLMs have a long way to go. Recent cases involving erroneous legal briefs that were generated by ChatGPT are illustrations of this. On a
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What makes you think ANY of this new found wealth will be shared with you? Why do you think it would be shared with you? They don't need you. You will die from exposure or starvation. Have a nice life. I will feel sad watching you die; waiting for my turn to experience the same thing.
Fantasy speculation (Score:4, Insightful)
Although I have no doubt that AI will eventually become useful, the stuff available today is nothing more than amusing crap generators
It will be deployed early and perform poorly, resulting in a huge backlash
Evolution into something truly useful will follow, slower than the hypemongers, pundits and futurists predict
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The proper term is "model collapse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse) and it has already started to be a problem. Essentially you cannot really train Artificial Incompetence on general Internet data anymore already. This effect will get worse over time.
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This.
Every new technology is going to kill jobs and leave everyone hungry and blah blah blah but only results in even more people getting hired as efficiency in old things frees up room to hire more people to do other new things.
I am not at all upset that when I start my phone app I am not talking to a telephone operator. Would someone please think of the telephone switch board operators?!
Re: Fantasy speculation (Score:2)
"Every new technology is going to kill jobs and leave everyone hungry and blah blah blah but only results in even more people getting hired"
You don't know what the word "only" means.
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Really? Thanks! You're so helpful! Can I call on you anytime I need some ocd English major nerdling to step in on a conversation?
Re: Fantasy speculation (Score:2)
Not unless you pay, correcting you would be a full time job and I'm only in it for the lulz
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Pay? No, I don't need your money to teach you to behave like a real human being but thanks for offering.
I will definitely keep you in mind the next time an ocd English major clown is needed. (hint: never).
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Not this time. Before, new tech came with productivity increases and some of that trickled down to everybody. That is not the case this time. Sure, people actually good at something do not need to fear, but that is not the majority of workers. What the current Artificial Incompetence actually (well, probably) can do is automate _bureaucracy_ and nobody benefits from having more of that.
Society is based on trust. People trust that they can make a reasonable living with whatever skills they have and hence ar
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What is so magical about AI?
Smart companies will hire more workers who are more efficient than before. Dumb companies will cut back on workers and not grow.
This is how it has happened with every previous efficiency technology.
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There is nothing magical about AI. The problem is that it can replace _useless_ desk jobs and there are a lot of those and there are also a lot of people that can only do those.
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If they're currently useless then they should learn a skill or maybe their only use was manual labor. No one is entitled to a cushy 6 figure office job.
No successful society has ever been intentionally inefficient so the useless people can live cushy lives.
Darwin is more than just a theory.
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That is nice, but it is essentially victim-blaming. All you are doing by that statement is virtue-signalling. These problems are real and you artificially elevating yourself is not contributing to any kind of solution.
No successful society has ever been intentionally inefficient so the useless people can live cushy lives.
I take it you have never heard the terms "aristocracy" or "old money" or even "religion" or "politics" then?
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I agree that a lot of AI can replace useless desk jobs.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that those useless desk job tasks can simply be eliminated entirely.
Woop de doop, an AI can auto unsumarize your 3 bullet points into a paragraph of bland, mushy prose that takes 10x as long to read. It seems to have passed a lot of people by that if there are only 3 bullet points of information, it's vastly more efficient to send that to the human who needs to read it.
Basically, speaking if writing can be done
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It doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that those useless desk job tasks can simply be eliminated entirely.
I think the reason is actually bureaucracy. In a bureaucracy, two things define your importance:
1. How much time of others you can "bind" (i.e. waste) and
2. How many people work for you
Item (2.) is the explanation for all the useless jobs, which are primarily found in large organizations.
Woop de doop, an AI can auto unsumarize your 3 bullet points into a paragraph of bland, mushy prose that takes 10x as long to read. It seems to have passed a lot of people by that if there are only 3 bullet points of information, it's vastly more efficient to send that to the human who needs to read it.
And that one is perfectly explained by Item (1.).
Basically, speaking if writing can be done by AI, then it was never necessary in the first place.
That is a pretty perfect description of LLMs.
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Item (2.) is the explanation for all the useless jobs, which are primarily found in large organizations.
Yeah, it's interesting. I don't think that captures it completely because this also happens in engineering orgs as well, and leads to turf wars to get more projects in there org and so more people. It's not even like the projects and people are necessarily useless.
1. How much time of others you can "bind" (i.e. waste) and
I don't think that quite captures it, I think there's another effect from which that'
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Ah, sorry. The time "bound" is not an outside measure. It is what an element of the bureaucracy thinks of themselves and their own importance. I should have been clearer on that.
I think HR (in most places) is just an excellent example for a _very_ bureaucratic organizational element, with the added double-whammy that they sort-of think that everybody they hire works for them in a sense (Item 2) but also is a valid target for Item 1.
Explains nicely why HR is often the dumbest shits but has a lot of power. Al
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Explains nicely why HR is often the dumbest shits but has a lot of power.
Also a great phrase I heard: no one ever grows up wanting to work in HR.
But yeah they think they are important so if they cost people work then they know they're doing something useful.
Utterly perverted incentives because HR judges itself and nobody dares to call them out on their crap.
It's not that no one dares, I tried and tried it's like shouting into the void. There is no mechanism to call them out on it. The only common point of c
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Utterly perverted incentives because HR judges itself and nobody dares to call them out on their crap.
It's not that no one dares, I tried and tried it's like shouting into the void. There is no mechanism to call them out on it. The only common point of contact is the CEO, and he's wasn't going to listen to me.
Well, true. That also happens.
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> the stuff available today is nothing more than amusing crap generators
The public stuff.
I got a demo of an application that all the companies employees are using. Everything they work on it is being fed into it and they have multiple LLMs working through it.
In the demo they gave it a real world use case and it proceeded to build marketing, architectural (with diagrams) and pricing documents.
All from materials that highly paid people doing the work up front.
The only flaw I could see in it is that you nee
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The shit will hit the fan when they tell the AI to generate their annual Sorbanes-Oxley accounting reports and then to file it when done, one when they ask it to fill out their taxes. If the marketing gets stuffed up it doesn't matter much at all. But with something important you can't just rely on experimental technology.
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The only flaw I could see in it is that you need experts to know that the materials are meaningful, but it was doing the majority of their work.
There are a few more you could not see. One is that this model is _static_. To evolve, it needs all the people producing the stuff it was trained on to continue producing. Also, basically all "demos" of this type include a large amount of fakery and the suits usually do not catch on and nobody asks the right questions.
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Well, while true that AI currently can only produce "better crap", the fact of the matter is that many jobs essentially are just producing crap. One really widespread problem for burnout and job-related depression is that many desk-workers know what they are doing is useless or worse. Hence many jobs are threatened by AI.
I do agree that efforts to replace engineers (and really, any reasonably good STEM graduates) will result in catastrophes, nothing else.
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I keep saying this.
Wait until the lawyers get involved after the first rash of poorly conceived executions. They'll get filthy rich, and then technical people will called in to clean up the mess.
Many companies will be lost and many golden parachutes given. It'll sour folks on AI for years.
The government will continue to use them, though.
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the stuff available today is nothing more than amusing crap generators
You are telling on yourself here. The current version of AI is extremely useful ... if you know how to use it. It seems that you are aware of its limitations but have not thoroughly explored what its actual uses are. *shrug*
I will be sad as I watch you starve to death. Don't get too angry as I will be following you sooner or later.
Can't wait (Score:2)
Can't wait for management to discover they no longer have anyone to throw under the bus when they replace all their reports with AI.
Re:Can't wait (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Can't wait (Score:2)
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Hehehehe, indeed! Automating bureaucracy (and that is all generative AI is fit to do) is pretty bad for the bureaucrats. Not that they are smart enough to understand that.
Just like everything else before (Score:4, Interesting)
When was the last history course you took? (Score:2)
There were decades of unemployment and social strife before other technologies coupled with Wars killing off millions of people created what we know today as the middle class.
A
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"It's like how Apple computer can charge $1,500 for a $500 laptop."
This statement falls down once one prices the same grade HW from Dell or HP, generally within $100 of each other...
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Think of it this way you've got seven companies that produce basically everything you buy. Those seven companies are owned by about 10% of all Americans because 93% of all stock is owned by the top 10%.
When I hear something like this it makes me think of a company like Bethlehem Steel. The Google of Steel a couple generations ago but gone today. Almost unimaginable they could ever go under. Why, because they sat on their laurels and could not compete when foreign companies used the tech of the day to build a better product for a fraction of the price. Even after getting protectionist tariffs put in place. Here we are talking about AI, possibly one of the largest disruptors ever. I see great opportunity
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Nope. This time is different. This time there is no product improvement or higher output. This time workers will get replaced an all that does is lowering cost, but no new jobs, no cheaper products, nothing.
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Nope. This time is different. This time there is no product improvement or higher output.
We are already seeing higher output. The quality is highly variable, but it will get better. I've seen practical applications work. This is only different because 1. it has potentially wider implications to people who thought they were special; and 2. very few people can see the other side of it yet.
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I do not know who you refer to by "we", but I do not see higher output anywhere.
Re: Just like everything else before (Score:2)
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Ah, you are talking about _temprorary_ things. Obviously these will go away when nobody can stand to see AI generated graphics anymore and AI generated tests are known to not cut it. That will take a few years, but it will happen.
You are half wrong (Score:2)
I have to disagree. There's a reason homelessness has been steadily increasing since PC's. Automation & outsourcing has reduced the number of low-skill jobs and low-discipline jobs. The newer jobs require more training and paying attention to more details and caveats, and this is JUST for entry level. You can't be a 7/11 clerk unless you master that convoluted lottery ticket machine, for example. (Clerks hate those, at least CA boxes.)
There are fewer options if your life has a hiccup. Why hire C-minus-g
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It will take time, but we will adapt, or rather our children will.
Not adapt, die off entirely. You and your ilk are no longer needed on this planet. We will not send you to gas chambers like WW2. No, that causes too much consternation amongst the masses... but make no mistake, there are too man "masses". Society will go on a diet soon and people like you and I (and our children) are considered the fat that must be lost for society to get healthy.
If you think about it without any regard to humanity itself, then it only makes sense that billions will starve to death soon. T
Workforce Multiplier (Score:3)
People buy this stuff when they can get a return on them. When a new technology is a workforce multiplier it is going to catch on and take over. For technology that doesn't pan out, there will be a more mixed response and it will likely never gain traction. Since "AI" encompasses many different technologies, I can only conclude that some of those technologies will be "winners" and are going to be adopted in business and industry.
The end result is one person can accomplish slightly more work than they use to. The same level of production or service will be possible with fewer employees. For short-sighted businesses this means they can hire fewer people. For more proactive businesses this is an opportunity to expand products and services using the same level of human resources.
For workers, those who can work with the new technology and be productive with it will be able to demand slightly higher salaries. As long as the economy continues to grow, the people who are left behind will likely have to transition laterally to different types of work. And are unlikely to see any improvement in pay as a result, this is effectively a demotion for them as the economy and inflation keep moving forward without them.
Is this system fair? No way. Seems really harsh to me. But to be the best of my knowledge it's how the world works today.
Telephone sanitizers (Score:2)
If your job can be easily replaced with AI, time to get on the colony ship to Mars along with the telephone sanitizers.
The sad thing is, the accounts executives, public relations executives, and management consultants are all probably unaffected.
I recently read TV news talking heads (Score:2)
Senior executives opinions (Score:3)
Remember all those things (Score:2)
70% of middle-class jobs have been lost to automation since 1980. Google it you can find the study from a business insider article. The jobs we are creating are unsustainable shit tier gig economy jobs.
This is why Bernie Sanders and the Democrats are starting to push for a 32 hour work week. We don
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End stage capitalism?
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Looks like it. A bit earlier than expected, but just replacing 10% of jobs with no replacements may be enough to make it all come crashing down.
It also tends to break the product and... (Score:2)
outlook (Score:2)
Despair (Score:2)
AI is a spend.. think accordingly (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:2)
AI seen cutting worker numbers AT survey companies. On another note, it occurred to me that AI could create horoscopes that would appear to be far more legit than what you read in the newspaper because it would have access to information about you. Then again, it might also fail quickly because of inaccurate predictions that were supposed to be better because it knew more about you.
Senior executives (Score:1)
But Where? (Score:2)
Because cashier, most phone answering jobs, a lot of customer service jobs... those can all be (and many have already for decades been) replaced with relatively simple AI or decision tree processes. Once you get to like L3 tech support and above you probably need humans, but there's no reason to pay someone $20/hr to say "Hello.... ok let me transfer you" for 8+ hours a day.
I have preferred self-checkout for about a decade just because I