Companies are actively not hiring expecting AI to compensate and still have growth. I have seen these same companies giving smaller raises and less promotions, and eliminate junior positions.
The endgame isn't more employees or paying them more. It's paying less people or no skilled people when possible.
We're just 3 years after a giant hiring binge, a similar amount of time post zero interest rates, the US economy has been threatening recession for two years, and economic uncertainty is very high, and post Covid had a glut of junior engineers coming onto the market. Between all of these plausible explanations for why hiring is way down, is there macro economic evidence it really is AI and not anything else?
That hiring binge was already nullified by the waves of layoffs.
I think everything else you’re saying is happening/has happened but companies hiring less because of anticipated AI productivity gains is also occurring. Like the scuttlebutt I hear about certain faangs requiring managers have 9-10 direct reports now instead of 7
I don't believe them. I believe that as we exit zero interest rates, companies have to cut back and "we are doing AI" is easier to sell the investors and even their own employees than "yeah we want to spend less on people".
All that I've seen with AI in the workplace is my coworkers becoming dumber. Asking them technical questions they should know the answer to has turned into "let me LLM that for you" and giving me an overly broad response. It's infuriating. I've also hilariously seen this in meetings, where folks are being asked something and awkwardly fill time while they wait for a response which they try and not read word for word.
This is interesting, but a few issues jump out at me.
There are fundamental issues mapping Biological Evolution to the formation of the universe. Evolution fundamentally works on 'introduce random variations into an environment with selective pressures and/or competition and if that variation produces a change that benefits the animal relative to those pressures and competition, it will more likely survive and reproduce' and that reproduction ultimately is what defines the fitness of that evolution. How does this apply to a uniform CMB, the sudden collapse to make supermassive black holes? The eventual formation of smaller black holes? The formation of planets? The expanding universe? Where is the competition? Where is the reproduction? Where are the selective pressures that define evolution? Where does this show branching and dead branches of evolution's failed attempts.
You repeatedly refer to evolution directing, favoring, having reproductive strategies etc. showing either a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution or a casual use of the terms that will confuse many readers. Evolution is a random and non-directed process. You describe a singular chain of events where those events are just as likely to be random and unconnected but try to imply strongly directed evolution because you approached it with the view that evolution would optimize this process and combined theories that could indicate a more optimized process (while not actually proving that optimization or any form of selection for it).
It fails to address observations backing the existence of dark matter while criticizing existing theories for failing to address observations that do not line up with their predictions.
Beyond that, are any of the predictions you make novel to just your story, or are they ultimately the combined predictions made by the various theories you are basing this on? I didn't see any that did not lead off the existing work that doesn't always require throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Ultimately this feels like a new interpretation combining a number of exciting and new discoveries that make predictions that JW is backing, approaching them with a philosophical view giving potential novel insights, but failing to disconnect the philosophy before engaging actual science and misunderstanding the difference between a good sounding science story and good science while on-boarding a fair amount of personal skepticism and frustration with the existing methods.
Its not to say that some of the theories its based on aren't correct, or that the existing theories aren't problematic, but it certainly feels like its leveraging the predictive power of other theories to do its heavy lifting.
It's a horseshoe. At some point regulatory capture comes in and makes the environment too expensive to enter let alone compete with established players
No regulation and too much regulation have terrible impacts, but identifying the middle ground is it's own problem.
...which is why the current tech regulations that Apple is running afoul of are only aimed at the top 1% of the market.
You're not gonna run afoul of Europe's antitrust laws by mere coincidence - you have to be a very big and established player before they become relevant (meaning you should have plenty of room to adapt, should you start to approach the limits specified in their legislation[0]). If you're just a small participant in the market, these laws aren't relevant to you.
Regulatory capture isn't really a risk for these regulations because most companies won't ever become that massive in the first place[0].
[0]: For reference, you need more than 75 billion euros in market value, 7.5 billion euros in profits from EU citizens or alternatively, more than 45 million active end users and more than 10k business customers before the real "big teeth" EU antitrust legislation (the Digital Markets Act) becomes relevant for a company. The overwhelming majority of tech companies aren't even close to being in that position (and almost certainly don't have a market cap that comes close to this), it's pretty much only GAFAM and ByteDance that are in this position.
VC/private equity requires growth levels that are unsustainable and the focus on that destroys the long term prospects of a lot of companies that otherwise would provide great value and support themselves.
So the ones that game marketing for revenue (badly developed or designed features, overselling, etc) win over those that provide real value.
The presumption that RTO is driving the wave of 'we need to be profitable' is myopic. The article rightly attributes it to financial liquidity. RTO is more expensive for most companies than remote which is often overlooked.
Now that that liquidity is lower, companies are incentivized to cut back excess they created. In many cases they aren't capable of actually determining value by employee, so most of these layoffs are impacting hard working and often critical employees (aka not coasters) that then struggle to find new jobs because both the market conditions and idiotic assumptions about these layoffs actually being performance related.
The performance narrative is literally to reduce the cost of regular layoffs which they now do almost yearly to attempt to inflate stock prices at key times, while not admitting that a fairly significant portion end up being hired back over the next 12 months (boomerangs lmao) to fill the critical holes they created.
The hype in the industry and the shit outcomes aren't the fault of employees but bad leadership and executives caring more about short term profit through deceptive marketing than creating value. And that's why as an employee creating value for a company is no longer enough to justify job security. If you care about value and not profit or margins than you are a coaster these days.
There will be more busts, but the narrative that coasters or entitled employees have anything to do with it is bunk.
I would rate Europe over US by far for car UX. My north American vehicles universally have the worst interfaces. My European Cars typically the best and Japanese/others in between.
The excess private borrowing to pay tariffs or higher cost supply lines to keep business moving, especially where the govt is using the money to give tax breaks to people already well above the income/consumption curve, is going to drive a spike in inflation.
As we've seen with covid and post covid cycles companies will adjust margins and increase profits after these spikes rather than reduce costs further increasing the length and impacts of inflation spikes.
On top of that I expect more performative crap like checks sent out in Trump's name that aren't enough to actually help for more than a single grocery bill, but drive debt and inflation up further overall.
So you're entire point is the US economy and population is larger, so it can bully its allies and economic partners more despite having a trade surplus in excess of 90 billion (including services which simpy makes sense, especially considering the size dichotomy you point out). That's a salient point in today's political climate, the US doesn't have allies or partners anymore.
Showing just how uninformed you are, Prime Minister Trudeau resigned already, and mostly unrelated to the US. Canadians were going to vote the out the Liberals largely over increasing dissatisfaction with his leadership long before the election. His resignation is allowing new leadership to take over the liberal party (being voted on this week), and then federally we will likely be going to the polls in the coming months to decide between them and the Conservatives (who are closer to your Democrats than most of you realize)
Whichever party wins, all of them are unified in standing strong against bullying tactics. You can hurt us, but you'll be surprised how resilient we are and how willing we are to fight economically or otherwise.
We look forward to being friends with most of you again after this bullshit is over.
The endgame isn't more employees or paying them more. It's paying less people or no skilled people when possible.
That's a fairly massive disruption.