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Like, no shit the plagiarism machine that cannot create anything truly novel and can only regurgitate other people's already existing work can't replace professionals. I legitimately hope all of these companies go under.
And that all the vibecoding they do instead will eventually turn their whole product into an unmanageable mess which cannot be salvaged.
Thing is, they CAN replace “professionals” — which is 80% of the population. They won’t replace the original thinkers, of which there are relatively few.
And most original thinkers aren’t feeling threatened by AI, as they can figure out something new to do.
I mean, I remember college. I remember how many people graduated without an original thought in their heads, focused only on getting the credentials to land their dream job. Those are the people generative AI is coming for.
Has it made life more difficult? Yes. Is it a magic wand that will make companies rich without human investment? Absolutely not. At the end of the day, it’s just making the baseline of human knowledge accessible to the highest bidders, with a bit of randomness and sycophancy thrown in. Which is a step up from confident BS with a bit of randomness and sycophancy thrown in.
They will, but they'll take you with them
While very different in some ways, some parallels between the AI-driven layoffs and the offshore outsourcing layoffs of the mid-2000s are striking.
Ultimately both scenarios were/are driven by corporate greed. And it looks like the AI one is backfiring for many of the same reasons as the offshore one.
They are replacing experienced staff who have strong critical thinking abilities and hands-on knowledge, and the replacements lack the institutional knowledge and the ability to look at the big picture, and they substitute speed for methodological discernment.
Time is cyclical.
I think replacing my boss might be possible. The error and hallucination quota seems similar.
I hate the notion of "laying off people to generate returns" so fucking much.
Wow you don't say. It's almost like jumping to firing the intelligent people who keep your business afloat at the mere idea that you could stuff a few more unnecessary dollars into your pocket without verifying the function of the "replacement" technology wasn't the best idea was it? Personally I'm not even mad about the money. I'm pissed at the tech industry's nonstop effort of attempting to discredit our work. I truly get why scientists get fed up and leave the country.
Get fucked, continuously.
Shocker. Just another excuse to fire higher paid workers, point at a line going up (until it doesn't), say AI a lot, and then hire lower paid workers for the same (or worse now fighting AI in some cases) job.
This is the real answer. AI is just an excuse to cut costs while the economy is going to shit. By claiming it is all about AI, they get to cut and slash all they want without signaling to the stock market and their competitors that things are going to shit. It also allows them to cut without blaming the economy because pointing out the failing economy would upset the man-baby that is fucking up the entire world economy.
The Csuites that will lose their jobs from this will actually get bonuses when they are fired. We will see some of them get fired for this reason. But If the whole thing truly imploded none of them will get fired though because it will be too costly to pull the chord on their golden parachutes.
I feel like a variation of this exact article gets posted here every single day for the past year or so, and every time the same comments show up underneath. Nobody ever opens one of these threads and discovers a surprising or novel point of view.
I don't understand why people spend their whole day talking about something they don't like. It's so bizarre to me.
Well it’s not just that people don’t like it, there are a lot of people whose jobs are on the line because of it.
So I guess it’s kind of hard for them not to keep talking about the thing that’s threatening their livelihood, which makes sense.
And of course they want to see news that tells them it isn’t going to be so bad and that their expertise will still be in demand.
I disagree - people's jobs are not on the line because of AI. They are on the line because of the economy and AI is the excuse/fad of the year so AI is what is blamed. However I maintain it is the economy not AI at fault.
Yes. But if it wasn’t for this particular fad their jobs would not have been on the line because there would be no alternative for their employers.
And of course it is not AI that is doing this. AI, can’t feel, think or do anything. It is simply another tool. Just like production robots have replaced automotive factory personnel on a large scale. And you couldn’t blame the people who lost their job for hating the machines that replaced them. It may not be rational, but it is understandable.
And of course if we are going to try to rationalise things, it is also not because of the economy. It is the people who benefit from replacing people with AI: the CEOs, employers and shareholders who care more about the companies’ profits than the human beings they employ. The people who have dehumanised their employees so much that in their minds, they are simply a tool to be used and discarded without any regard for the lives they are destroying. The reason why these people are the way they are and act the way they do has many factors that are way too complicated for any employee who is about to lose their job to an AI to understand.
But if it wasn’t for this particular fad their jobs would not have been on the line because there would be no alternative for their employers.
There have been many layoffs over the years. Laying people off because the economy isn't good is nothing new, and AI did nothing to make it more or less possible.
If the economy was really good AI would have been used not to replace people but to make them more productive thus earning the company even more money.
Machines also kept replacing car factory workers even when the economy was thriving, so that’s not it.
I’m pretty sure it’s human greed.
I don't understand why people spend their whole day talking about something they don't like. It's so bizarre to me.
Of course spending a full day on it is a different story, but I think it's important to discuss things you don't like, from time to time, and with different people. It can lead to new thoughts and solutions, as an example.
Well, if you do it constructively.
Agentic AI. I always cringe a little when I hear that term.
Maybe we shoild all rush into doing things we dont undrrstand
The big shots try to hold it back.
Fools try to wish it away.
The hopeful depend on a world without end.
Whatever the hopeless may say.
Once politicians start to decry it, it's too late.
No higher ROI AND they now have a mission critical dependency on a powerful third party (rather than on the far more fragmented and generally weaker counterparties which are employees).
Even on pure business terms and not even considering the longer term accumulation of problems and hence fall in returns over time due to second order problems of using AI in certain areas (i.e. the consequences of the much higher high-severity-error rates of AI compared to even barelly trained humans or the inability of AI to learn and improve) it's a seriously incompetent choice.
I mean, you can excuse a Manager for not understanding the higher level structural problems of AI given how much the messaging around it for non-techies so far has just swamped people with "butterflies and rainbows" views on AI, but considering the risks of dependencies on third parties is a central skill for any decent Upper level manager as is looking at what an investment is returning and pivoting when it's not delivering.
CEOs are getting their pockets filled so, yeah, I think its exactly the way companies think.
If your company uses AI (in the colloquial LLM sense), it deserves to go bankrupt.
No ifs, ands, or buts.
Period.
If it uses it as a core pillar of their business, the owners deserve to empty their entire life earnings to the employees in perpetuity and they shouldn't ever own anything better than a cardboard box home.
We need to make using this absolutely painful for owners.
For people like Altman, it should be death row worthy.
If you lay off all the humans so AI can be cheap labour for corporations then there are only three alternatives.
- provide humans with a universal basic income and living wage.
- kill them all.
- let them loose and let them wander (more addicitons, more theft, more homelessness, more violence).
you also end up with AI buying AI from AI as there are no humans to generate or recieve the AI output.
🤔🧐😈
Or you can start a land war in asia. Talked to a 44 year old on the train who's basically living at a shelter. He would join the army if they would take him....
I work in the food industry in a somewhat big company in Italy. In all the productive process, we have found exactly 1 (one) application for an AI. And I'm not talking about an LLM, but about the good ol' machine learning: It's a system that checks the labels of the product to see if they are good or not. It needed training but now it can check if the labels are fit for the market faster than a person. That's it. That's the single part of the whole process in which an AI has removed a person and just because it's a job that a human couldn't do it fast enough anyway.
For the rest? The higher ups realized that there's always the need of human intervention because even the simpler work requires of a decision making that a machine simply can't do.
We also have nopilot for the computers but only because it comes with the office package that the company pays. Nobody actually uses it other than to ask it stupid things.
this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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