Giant Sucking Sound

“That giant sucking sound of jobs going south”.

Ross Perot immortalized that phrase in the presidential race of 1992 when he was talking about NAFTA causing jobs to go to Mexico. It appears he was right about that: manufactfuring jobs were offshored, probably first to Mexico, then to China. I do wonder if NAFTA was the seeds for today’s insanity.

Now, it appears we have a new giant sucking sound: AI gunning for white collar jobs.

Lately, the tenor of news articles has turned to AI replacing some workers.

CNET is a media website that actually started using AI to write its articles before ChatGPT came out in late November. I’m under the impression that CNET didn’t hide AI was being used to write articles, but it also wasn’t made really clear either. CNET was criticized for not disclosing the “authorship”. Then, one of its competitors found that the articles written by AI contained errors, incorrect math, and plagiarized materials, further embroiling CNET in controversy.

AI project was pulled back…but only temporarily. It was recently reported that Red Ventures, the media boss, was looking to push forward again with AI writing its articles. Because CNET, or maybe it’s Red Ventures, are not doing too well financially, the parent company is looking to cut costs by replacing humans with machines.

So, every time there is a downturn and companies face the need to cut costs, replacing people with AI will look extremely attractive. Each downturn will be a chip chipping away of people’s jobs.

Next, voice actors are in the corporate crosshairs. Fortune, in a very dramatic fashion, described how AI companies are trying to replace voice actors, and they are getting help from voice actors to do it. Well, I didn’t think of that one.

Fortune also reported that ResumeBuilder, a resume writing website, did a poll of 1000 executives and found that roughly half have implemented the chatbot and half of that group have replaced workers. What are companies using chatbots for?

“66% for writing code, 58% for copy writing and content creation, 57% for customer support, and 52% for meeting summaries and other documents.”

Fortune, “Some companies are already replacing workers with ChatGPT, despite warnings it shouldn’t be relied on for ‘anything important’”, Trey Williams, February 25, 2023

What that, it behooves us to figure out how to use the tools to our advantage. I’ve been saying since around 2013 that automation was coming and that we need to prepare for that day.

That day is here.

I don’t have clear answers other than to get really digital savvy and know how to use the AI tools to your advantage. There is no point in hoping that companies will institute AI as a complement to our skills rather than as a replacement. In fact, the earliest indicators are that they are being used as a replacement, especially during feared recessionary times, which we are currently in. During recessions, the first thing companies do is cut costs and that typically entails laying off people.

Before, companies laid off people with a hit to productivity.

Now, with the introduction of AI, there may be no hit.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Over the medium term or long term, if enough people are laid off due to AI replacement and no new sufficiently well-paying jobs are created, your buying market starts to decline. What happens then? It feels like things gets dicey. You are producing goods that no one can buy.

On another capitalistic front

On another note, Twitter had to do another layoff.

What’s remarkable about this round is that at least one of the hard-core was laid off. She was one who last year tweeted an image of her sleeping at the office, doing her hard-core intense work.

Now she’s been laid off.

She still says doing the hard-core stuff was the right thing to do for Twitter and that she was proud of her stint at Twitter. We’ll see if time and distance force a reassessment of her value system.

But being hard-core does not insulate you from being laid off to compensate for Musk’s poor strategic judgement in buying Twitter. The regular workers are paying for his gross mistake. Since he has come on, he has trashed the Twitter environment by bringing back folks who had previously been banned, he has lost ad buyers with that same decision, and has scared off customers by delving into incendiary politics. He has laid off too many engineer that Twitter is now technologically degrading and suffers from periodic outages. The people are suffering from his bad management mistakes.

I don’t know if we can call him genius anymore. How did he manage to run the other companies? Maybe he has a secret plan and we don’t know it.