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> “We have a line of sight to drive approximately $1 billion of gross run rate savings over three years across product development, customer service and support

> “We have a line of sight to drive approximately $1 billion of gross run rate savings over three years across product development, customer service and support, and many of our operational processes […] through artificial intelligence adoption and enablement.” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46054057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46054057 HP posted the above today, announcing the layoffs of several thousand workers on the basis that AI may deliver on its promises in the next three years. Whether your argument is valid or not, hundreds of companies now have gambled their future earnings growth on the same AI-hopeful theory of layoffs that HP has so plainly stated. If it ends up being a “significant” investment or not will be determined by future events, so I won’t try to argue either way in that regard. We’ll both find out soon enough!

aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
> HP posted the above today, announcing the layoffs of several thousand workers on the basis that AI may deliver on its promises in the next three years. My feeling is that this story has barely anything to do with AI. AI was rather a "socially acceptable" welcome excuse for firing lots of people (which may be necessary or be a bad idea; we'll see).
- altairprime 11mo ago
  They’re rational actors, though, right? So one can assume that they wouldn’t put a billion dollars of revenue at risk if they didn’t have a plan for replacing the efforts of those workers — and since they’re a publicly traded company, and this is a material forward-looking statement, there would be SEC penalties if they don’t truly mean what they said about AI replacing the workers. Any rational company would take care not to knowingly lie here without having done enough due diligence to have plausible affirmability of what they claim. (If they’re behaving irrationally, then of course all interpretations are void, but that would invalidate the rationality basis of the comment thread I’m responding to, so I’m not considering that branch of possibilities in this specific thread.)

aleph_minus_one 11mo ago

> HP posted the above today, announcing the layoffs of several thousand workers on the basis that AI may deliver on its promises in the next three years. My feeling is that this story has barely anything to do with AI. AI was rather a "socially acceptable" welcome excuse for firing lots of people (which may be necessary or be a bad idea; we'll see).

altairprime 11mo ago
They’re rational actors, though, right? So one can assume that they wouldn’t put a billion dollars of revenue at risk if they didn’t have a plan for replacing the efforts of those workers — and since they’re a publicly traded company, and this is a material forward-looking statement, there would be SEC penalties if they don’t truly mean what they said about AI replacing the workers. Any rational company would take care not to knowingly lie here without having done enough due diligence to have plausible affirmability of what they claim. (If they’re behaving irrationally, then of course all interpretations are void, but that would invalidate the rationality basis of the comment thread I’m responding to, so I’m not considering that branch of possibilities in this specific thread.)