Originally published at: IBM announced it would pause hiring and replace 7,800 jobs with AI | Boing Boing
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6 months later, after the tsunami of screw-ups in the back office force him to try (unsuccessfully) to re-hire people to fix things, he’ll be complaining that “lazy Americans don’t want to work.”
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…and who would they get to actually use those AI programs??? Like around two-third of those people would have be hired back eventually, with much higher pay to ease their fears about getting fired and being replaced with AI again by the company so they look more appealing to investors even though the move ultimately cost them both money and reputation.
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This is going to end well.
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That worked out so well for IBM in their previous AI hype cycle. Remember when they cured cancer? It was just after solving Jeapardy and quite as useful.
It doesn’t matter whether anything works or not, sacking people en masse is a goal in itself in contemporary techbro capitalism. Inflate stock prices because doing this is perceived as 5D chess clever.
Management and the VC class get even richer.
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CEO is non-customer-facing, just saying.
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It’s an endless cycle of mass layoffs and mass hirings at that company. I distinctly remember interviewing for a job there in NYC in the early 2000s. I probably didn’t get the job, but it didn’t matter because I internally noped right out after being interviewed by a clearly dispirited VP on a ghost-town floor of their very expensive office tower.
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So HR will be handled by AI. Sounds fair. All decisions will be very final.
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At least IBM already has an AI that can play chess.
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IBM investors, they just announced they’re looting the company
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Fast forward to when, like Atari, some dubious company is suing people over the name and trademarks.
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If AI can do the work of 7,800 people, surely it can also do the job of one CEO.
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That artwork slightly hints of Kelly Freas. 
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Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations
I notice that employee-facing roles can be automated but customers are too important and must be handled by employees. It is interesting to note that IBM’s “most valued resource” can be handled by automation but customers cannot.
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If a CEO is non-customer-facing they ain’t doing their job.
(Some may well not be doing it as much or as well as they ought.)
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This is bullshit. The layoff likely had very little to do with AI, they are just using it as an excuse
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Yeah, this was my reaction as well. If anything, I’d have thought that a CEO could be far more easily replaced by a ‘magic predictive text’ tool (which we do at least now have) than any of the people trying to do back office work…
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To be fair if you put a pair of googly eyes and a tie on a bluetooth speaker which shouted abuse at any women walking past and syphoned off 80% of the profit while generating nothing but a PowerPoint once every six months which had laser sound effects you could replace all CEOs
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