Erst gestern gab es viel Aufregung über den Clickbait-Titel in diesem Artikel – MICROSOFT ENTLÄSST 1.500 MITARBEITER UND MACHT DIE SCHULD "KI-WELLE".
Nach einem starken dritten Quartal entlässt Microsoft Berichten zufolge zwischen 1.000 und 1.500 Mitarbeiter in seinen Azure-Cloud- und Mixed-Reality-Abteilungen.
Beim Durchlesen des Artikels wird klar, dass es sich tatsächlich um interne Kostensenkungs- und Entlassungsmaßnahmen bei Microsoft handelt, die nicht direkt mit KI/ML zusammenhängen.
Automatisierung führt zweifellos zu einer verbesserten Produktivität und einem Rückgang der Belegschaft. Aber gibt es in letzter Zeit auch Hinweise darauf, dass tatsächlich Arbeitsplätze durch KI/ML verloren gegangen sind?
https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dcbyv1/there_is_a_lot_of_buzz_in_the_media_about_aiml/
17 Kommentare
The only time job losses because of AI are a bad thing is when people rely on the money from those jobs to live.
Hopefully that is a problem AI will be able to fix, as it seems our human leaders have been at a loss for a solution to this that doesn’t involve lowering population levels for quite some time already.
There’s jobs “lost” to pay for the infrastructure.
Of course companies could also not hand out dividends and have the same amount spent on infra but that won’t do.
Actual people used to answer the phone at customer service no annoying endless robo menu that never had a pick that’s the actually reason why your calling. Same story for chat. So frustrating and you’re wasting my time so I can online chat with a bot.
Do you honestly believe that most companies would openly admit they are replacing people with AI? It isn’t exactly a good look. People have absolutely lost their jobs to AI and it is heavily under reported.
New hires are also being effective. And if a place can get someone using AI to do 3 jobs in the place of 1, then that’s 2 jobs gone without it being reported.
Not saying that is what Microsoft is doing, but I doubt we are getting the full story.
I recently started building image classification ai models for work. I feel bad because it’s going to cut 50% of work from 3/8 coworkers but if I don’t do it…I literally have no work since that’s why I’m here.
So yes. It may not be an immediate impact but my coworkers feel it already. Thankfully, they are older. Most of them are close to retirement. Hopefully, it’ll all work out between the models going live and them retiring.
The only thing less than the number of jobs lost due to AI are the profits any of these companies have actually made from any of these systems.
Sort of. The main „employment change“ right now I’m hearing is outsourcing contracts shrinking. If you use 3rd party labor supplements, those contracts are reducing in the number of people needed to support your account. So the AI purchasing company may not lay anyone off directly for AI but they still need fewer people.
Funny, I just posted this elsewhere.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/05/02/almost-65000-job-cuts-were-announced-in-april-and-ai-was-blamed-for-the-most-losses-ever/
Of 64,789 April job cuts . . . 800 were blamed on „AI“.
However after digging, I have yet to actually find any company anywhere explaining where actual AI is now doing a job that caused layoffs. All I found were execs restructuring to free up money to hire AI depts so they can get in on that sweet sweet buzzword stock price bump before the bubble bursts.
Many translation jobs are slowly being replaced, mostly boring ones like transcription for subtitles and other transcription services etc
Customer service agents are mostly AI’s these days that will route to a actual person if absolutely necessary. There are other jobs that are machine automation adjacent, like postal address identification that is almost entirely automated at this point.
It is a slow crawl of jobs being lost to automation, recently there has been a major uptick in job losses in tech due to huge amounts of automation in coding specifically but that’s a relatively small portion of the total job market. Really what will cause the average person to see job losses will be the eventual production of a general purpose robot. We are getting very close to that at this point with things like the tesla bot and boston dynamics making huge strides in that field. Once robots can do manual labor jobs like brick laying, drywall installation, framing, and finishing work the construction field is basically going dry up overnight. Those are super low risk, repetitive jobs that are prime for general purpose bots. Things where humans are at risk such as rail, freight, shipping, and piloting are at much less risk due to the liability factor in an ironic twist when we assumed they would be the first to go.
So back to the main question, no. Because the jobs that can be automated right now ARE automated right now, there was never anyone working those jobs. Jobs will not start to be lost in large numbers until we have those robots. Instead of losing jobs, companies will restructure and call it something other than „we’re firing 40% of our workforce because we can just get a computer to do it now“. Businesses will spring up that are automated from the beginning, thus no jobs „lost“ only created.
When you start to see humanoid robots unloading trucks at grocery stores is when you need to start to panic and we’re not far away now.
Yes. As a middle level manager I can tell that we have objectives to replace X amount of “human” worked hours with AI, the problem is that they seem achievable and we’re not talking about single digit percentages…
2025 will be wild.
Most call centres have a huge number of AI lost roles, fast food drive throughs, chat help assistants for stores/supermarkets
Well if you just think about Microsoft, a product we all have used for decades that still has annoying bugs in a simple word program, I mean come on. What the heck are they doing over there?! Formatting errors and problems for 30 years?!
I think that the problem with answering this is that companies don’t do things quickly, not really large, influential companies.
At the end of 2023 I was working on a project for a PoC that would use azure implementations of OAI’s models to take calls, interact with the correct APIs etc. intentionally working towards replacing phone agents.
Another person was automatically reviewing calls and creating feedback for specific agents.
Talking to a friend who is still with the company they just let go ~2k people including managers an SMEs of an entire section, yet the calls are still being answered.
Managers have been given the hard word that the expectations need to change around the amount of effort needed to stand out and keep their roles.
These things happen over years and go underground fast once it gets any real attention. It is 100% happening but slowly like boiling a frog.
The only actual cases of jobs replaced by AI I’ve read about were for very important things like making SEO optimized spam websites — think those recipe sites with 50 paragraphs of nonsense; clickbait articles with 0 content; and scams. In other words, jobs where the quality of the content is irrelevant. Everything else is largely an excuse by companies to justify layoffs as something other than rampant corporate greed. It’s still not socially acceptable for a company to fire people for a reason other than goosing share prices because the CEO wants another bonus.
It’s replaced some folks at the company my brother-in-law works for. A major logistical company in the south. They laid off several SWEs and have been on a hiring freeze ever since. They’re simply able to get the work done with fewer people now. People can bury their head in the sand if they wish, it’s pretty clear. A massive uptick in productivity means fewer people are needed to do the work. Not every company has an endless pile of software-related work, and a lot of folks work at these kinds of companies.
Yes. https://www2.societyofauthors.org/2024/04/11/soa-survey-reveals-a-third-of-translators-and-quarter-of-illustrators-losing-work-to-ai/
All the layoffs have been to cut costs and make existing workers just do more.
CEO found out that they have to go pay for AI too and rather just overwork people instead.