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41% of incendiary articles are purely written to gather clicks. Think of the hilarity and irony of the title itself. How could you, really, interview All of t

• forgetfreeman 2y ago
  I'm not sure what's sillier, banking on 3rd party bullshit generators to handle work product or ignoring the likelihood that executive tier depravity extends to these kinds of depths when the prospect of cutting labor costs is presented.
  • imgabe 2y ago
    I don’t know, we manage all right with the 1st party bullshit generators.
    • forgetfreeman 2y ago
      You want to review the hiring slump in software development or perhaps the massive layoffs in middle management nationwide? We could also go take a look at what generative AI is doing to creatives income streams. Careful with that "we", it may not cover as much as you think. Edit: it occurred to me that I may not fully understand what your comment was meant to convey Are you saying labor is doing fine or work product created by generative AI is of acceptable quality?
      • imgabe 2y ago
        I’m making a joke that a lot of existing work product is already bullshit that has to be generated by humans so we may as well automate that.
        • forgetfreeman 2y ago
          You've got me boxed in there.
        • cudgy 2y ago
          Makes sense. Let’s maximize the bullshit generation.
  • ijidak 2y ago
    Yeah. Even if generative AI assisted workers are not as productive as their managers imagine, craven managers will still cut or refuse to hire staff and tell their employees to just use more AI to get work done. I think many of us on Hacker News underestimate the depths to which middle tier managers will go to appease higher ups. Even in the case where AI productivity is total fiction, that doesn't mean it won't have a huge impact on the workload given to a single worker. All the way back to Pharaoh in the Bible when he is quoted as saying, 'They are relaxing! Let them make bricks without straw!' Hiring reduction doesn't require an entirely real productivity boost. It only requires the MBA and Management Consulting led perception that hiring fewer humans is now the smart thing to do!
• joshdavham 2y ago
  > 41% of incendiary articles are purely written to gather clicks. Agreed. This is just fear-baiting.
• benreesman 2y ago
  The year is 2029. The LinkedIn/Meta merger has resulted in a 100% rate of LLM recruiter agents and applicant agents sending emails with keywords set not to display via the “color” CSS consuming all Internet bandwidth. The survivors envy the dead: what few resources remain are devoted to an arms race between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on building the tallest and most efficient phallus to nowhere. The only way for anyone, wherever they were born, to be part of the rocket class is to apply for an H1B visa. The lowest rate of accepted applications is in East Palo Alto. Surfer Zuck hasn’t been seen in decades.
  • NBJack 2y ago
    > Surfer Zuck hasn’t been seen in decades. But a suspicious and perpetually young version of him, in the exact same office background and a weirdly off voice, regularly appears in video messages before every earnings call. He speaks of great opportunity and growth for the Meta Quest X, and assures the investors that the scant few humans remaining are perfectly targeted for the next wave of MetaM-8s to find them, corner them, then display enough ads on their chest screen until the victims give in and willingly max out their Bezos Card as each bot meticulously records their frantic taps through the checkout process. In the distance, the next set of competing space rockets roar off into an orange sky choked with delivery drones.
    • benreesman 2y ago
      Your satire is better than mine! This is some dark shit and I’ll thank you for giving me a little humor to go with the Black Mirror screenplay happening in real time.
    • benterix 2y ago
      I just wonder - don't these current billionaries see how their actions literally shape the world to be a worse place to live in? I believe Gates, in spite all the hate towards him, actually has this kind of conscience and good intention of wondering, "How could I actually help the world in an optimal way?" and choosing his way (saving lives through vaccines; whether these are happy lives or not it's another question). But seeing that your businesses make the world worse and not doing anything seems completely short sighted. These folks have children, too - what kind of world they want to leave them?
• jhyk 2y ago
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• anigbrowl 2y ago
  The World Economic Forum released its bi-annual survey on what employers worldwide expect their businesses to look like in the future and much of the attention is on generative AI. And while a majority (77%) expect to help train their existing staff to work with AI, 41% say they expect to reduce the number of staff they employ as AI automates more tasks on the job. The survey includes 1,000 employers worldwide, which covers more than 14 million workers in 22 different industry clusters, according to the new report. One of the big problems that emerges from the survey is that employers believe many of their workers don’t have the skills needed to do their jobs as technology evolves. While I share your skepticism about the viability or specificity of predictions, large think tanks do this sort of research all the time and provide at least some indication of where corporate weathervanes are pointing and trends in business management, be they fundamental or faddish. This information was all laid out in the first 2 paragraphs. You could have critiqued their track record or methods rather than asserting such questions are meaningless. Why do you think it's so outlandish to survey ~1000 corporations, especially if that's your raison d'etre and you do it twice a year, every year? 41% of the business today won't exist by 2028. You think 40% of businesses are going to disappear in the next 3 years? That seems unlikely. I assume you're being sarcastic.
  • makeitdouble 2y ago
    > You think 40% of businesses are going to disappear in the next 3 years? That seems unlikely. I assume you're being sarcastic. The average life span of a business is short. Even for S&P500 companies it's only 15 years[0], if we take in all the startup and small/individual businesses, parent's 3 year bet is aggressive, but not completely unreasonable. [0] https://www.ey.com/en_gl/insights/consulting/how-businesses-can-stand-the-test-of-time https://www.ey.com/en_gl/insights/consulting/how-businesses-...
    • hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
      I went to the referenced article about the 15 years (https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/42134/ https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/42134/), but I'm very skeptical as to what that actually means without more info (I just read the abstract, don't have access to the full article). I'm sure a huge part of that is there is much more M&A than there was 80 years ago. I also don't even understand how the quote in the abstract can make sense, because it states "The average lifespan of a US S&P 500 company has fallen by 80% in the last 80 years", but that article was written in 2018 and the S&P 500 was only created in 1957. There were no "S&P 500 companies" 80 years ago. I'm also guessing the WEF's survey list skews heavily, if not entirely, to large, established employers.
• safety1st 2y ago
  No you've got your head in the sand. 41% of firms having plans to reduce staff with AI as part of the reason - that figure 100% tracks for me from conversations with upper management and C-suite at client sites. Whether they will all get around to it or not I don't know but they enthusiasm they have for it is tremendous. I have no plans to cut staff within my own company but I also see very little headcount growth as being necessary in the next few years. The mechanisms here are simple and plausible, 1) The task now is to train people on how to use generative AI to get more done - if you think this trend doesn't exist you really do have your head in the sand, this is happening, now, today, some roles and people do better with it than others but it is happening. 2) The upcoming task will be to let go of the least efficient performers, who have not increased their productivity by incorporating generative AI into their workflow. It will work, a part of the staff will complete X% more tasks, this will translate into X% of jobs being made redundant. When this large cost cutting opportunity exists and execs are basically chomping at the bit to make it happen, it will be super hard to achieve a positive hiring climate. Now in eras past this might have been blunted by a number of factors, but all these factors are on their last legs: A) Quality is a real issue when you double someone's workload and tell them to get it done using GenAI. However the global economy is increasingly consolidated under large firms that possess a lot of market power - they are too big and entrenched to be unseated, so they don't really have to deliver quality, they know this, they can just be shitty monopolies, cut costs, and feast anyway because the barriers to entry for competition are too high, consumer switching costs are too high etc. Quality is just going to go down and that is just going to be the new world. Big tech understands this opportunity better than anyone else, every single one of them is a criminal enterprise, and due to weak government enforcement every single one of them is still posting amazing profits B) Demographics are now working against us instead of for us -- turns out everyone has decided not to have kids, which means an end to population growth, consumption growth, ergo hiring growth. The nature of compounding numbers is that it's a slow burn until suddenly it isn't and if you look at a 10+ year horizon absolutely firms are thinking about this and they know there is no reversal to this trend, there is no gearing up for a future where everything suddenly doubles, long term the goal is to prepare for the shuttering of a lot of operations, adapting to markets being smaller, and this of course means managing a secular downward trend for your headcount, not upward. It is a very precarious time we are entering, we either need to start busting trusts and making babies again, or the way of life that we knew is going to end. AI if anything is what is going to help us limp along into the twilight without a complete collapse of the value chain. Either way there is going to be a pretty limited appetite for new hiring in the foreseeable future due to a confluence of trends.
• throwaway290 2y ago
  You don't need to interview all employers. It's called sampling.
  • cudgy 2y ago
    Sure, but the title of the article blatantly states otherwise in order to give grandiose impression.
    • NicuCalcea 2y ago
      Not really, it's perfectly reasonable to describe a survey as they did. If I say "59% of Americans are satisfied with their commute", I wouldn't have to specify in the headline that I didn't actually ask every single American.
      • cudgy 2y ago
        Matter of opinion I guess. Should an advertiser be able to claim the same immunity?
        • NicuCalcea 2y ago
          Sure, they do already.
        • chefandy 2y ago
          > Matter of opinion I guess. It's not. The discipline of statistics knows a lot about population sizes, sample sizes, margins of error, and that sort of thing. If you're going to seriously question the fundamental ideas in statistics, there's a whole lot of empirical evidence you need to refute. > Should an advertiser be able to claim the same immunity? Have you ever purchased anything that was marketed using statistics? Lots of things, I imagine. How many polls have you answered about those statistics? I'm not really sure how you'd get the impression that anything else was ever the case.
• deleted 2y ago
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• Over2Chars 2y ago
  Totes bro.