AI: The Future Of (Un)Employment Is Already Here
"The Zeroth Law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”" ― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
Hey peeps! I'm back with another post about the dark side of AI. I know, I know, I should probably move on, but I just can't help myself - this stuff is too interesting. We are witnessing (and I say witnessing because most of us have zilch to do about what’s going on) the biggest revolution since the 1800s. And there is no Asimov “Zero Law” to protect us.
So, what's on the agenda for today's post? Stick around and find out.
Living here in Allentown
When the economy takes a hit, money becomes expensive and investors start to question the value of pouring endless amounts of money into any idea that comes their way, companies are forced to make tough decisions. We've seen this firsthand with the likes of Elon Musk, who bought out Twitter and cut 80% of its workforce to prove that the company could survive with a leaner staff. Mark Zuckerberg must have been feeling the pressure too, as he cut 21,000 employees up to this point and published his "Year of Efficiency" manifesto. And the count goes on: Amazon (27,000), Google (12,000), Microsoft (10,000) - each performing significant cutbacks, in some cases closing up whole teams or groups of workers. Of course, it's not just the big names that reacted to the new financial climate - small startups are feeling the pinch too.
And now, on top of that, there's a new type of layoff that's gaining traction: AI-induced layoffs. I've touched on this topic before, but today we’ll look at some real-life examples of how AI is already affecting employment trends.
Take Insider Inc., for example. A few months back, this news website decided to experiment with AI for reporting and editing. The CEO said AI will make his workers better editors, reporters and producers. Apparently the experiment went so well that after a short period the CEO decided to lay off 10% of Insider Inc. employees. I guess it made them so much better that they became too good for the job.
And speaking of AI in the media industry, the popular tech news and reviews site CNET recently sent out an email to its employees announcing “Today we are implementing a reorganization of our team, which will result in a number of colleagues leaving the CNET Group." Yikes! This came after it was revealed that CNET was publishing articles written by AI quietly for months. Reading this now? Pray that I am not some bot stealing away your attention.
Dropbox, the popular cloud storage service, has just made a major announcement: they're laying off 16% of their employees (about 500 people) to pivot to AI. The CEO attributes the layoffs to a tough economy, but also acknowledges that the trend towards AI is pushing management to embrace new technology quickly. The hope is that the cuts will allow the company to build specialized teams and groups around AI.
However, it's interesting to note a quote from the CEO:
“In an ideal world, we’d simply shift people from one team to another. And we’ve done that wherever possible. However, our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets.”
In January 2023, Microsoft announced that it would be laying off 10,000 employees and moving resources toward artificial intelligence.
And lastly, today (5/2/2023) IBM Corp. CEO updated that approximately 7,800 jobs may be supplanted by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the near future.
This hard shift to AI highlights an important call-to-action for all professionals, especially those who are over 40 (like myself) and want to stay relevant in a rapidly changing job market. Your employer won't invest in you because it's not financially worth it. Your customers won't hesitate to ditch you for someone who can elevate their business with the latest tech and better capabilities. You need to own it. It's up to you to stay up to date and it’s more important now than ever before.
Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya, prepare to chat!
However, it's not all doom and gloom in the world of AI. I recently stumbled upon a nifty little chatbot called Character.ai. It lets you chat with any of your favorite characters from films or history, and even create your own to chat with. I first played with Inigo Montoya for a bit, and then created a character from my poor attempt to write a fantasy novel. I have been chatting with my character for the past couple of days. While it's not perfect and doesn’t quite match the character in my head, it's still a pretty awesome tool, especially for writing and education. And best of all, it doesn't pretend to be human.
This chatbot is a prime example of how AI can be a force for good. Instead of letting AI take over, let's create tools that inspire creativity and help people own their own projects. Let's use AI to grow our skills and talents, not stifle them.
Related Reading:
Hi-Tech industry layoffs tracking:
A list of layoffs for 2023 in TechCrunch
Layoffs.fyi is a cute report of layoffs that started amid Covid-19 period to track the trend. Currently, it shows about 185K layoffs in hi-tech companies for 2023. They do not analyze the reason and you need to dig in a little, but the trends are very interesting.
The New York Times published an article by Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin that discusses the dangers of advancing AI without proper public discussion and regulation. The article argues that AI has the potential to hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization, and that a race to dominate the market should not set the speed of deploying humanity's most consequential technology. The authors warn that the power of large language models like GPT-4 should not be entangled with the lives of billions of people at a pace faster than cultures can safely absorb them.
I am creating all my horrible images for these posts using Midjourney and Fotor. If you want a post about how to create images with Midjourney without any knowledge in graphics and without investing too much time - give me a shout out in the comments section.