Die Herabstufung des amerikanischen Technikarbeiters
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/after-layoffs-meta-is-training-ai-on-its-own-workers.html
Die Herabstufung des amerikanischen Technikarbeiters
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/after-layoffs-meta-is-training-ai-on-its-own-workers.html
27 Kommentare
> tech’s most visible leaders are eagerly making a new offer to their employees: the prospect of downward mobility, limited freedom, and de-skilling. They’re being told that they may be replaceable and that to find out if they are, they’ll have to try to train their replacements.
Never thought I’d miss the days when tech companies would clutter up their offices with ping pong tables and kegs.
For like 3 weeks there was a lot of crowing from tech bros about how doomed all the people with liberal arts degrees were. Unfortunately it turns out that those jobs don’t have unit testing, but the tech bro’s jobs did. Oof.
This is why I hope AI crashes. Lots of CEOs have a pipe dream of massive skyrocketing revenue with the barest minimum workforce running off the lowest pay. It’s not doable. It’s not achievable. It’s all a lie.
its rough out there man. my boss has openly told us, „yeah in a year from now all our jobs will be obsolete, they basically already are honestly“ when everyone on the team is more stressed and burned out than ever
What a horrible time to be alive.
Lmao what a great way to fast track their demise. What do you think happens to thousands or millions of poor out of work people? Sure some of them will find other jobs or career paths…until ai comes for that too. Once the security of food and shelter are gone the pitchforks come out and the CEOs will be lucky if all the masses aim for are just the data centers
>Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers.
Where have I heard this before…?
>“This work is so crude and elementary in its nature that the writer firmly believes that it would be possible to train an intelligent gorilla so as to become a more efficient pig-iron handler than any man can be.“
In reducing the activity of workers to the bare necessities of the task in hand and removing any thought or skill from that task Taylor removed the more desirable and challenging parts of the work and made it monotonous, tedious and unremittingly boring. Taylor recognised that “The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character.” But he argued that the unskilled worker was not harmed by the monotonous work because he was stupid.
*-* *Frederick Winslow Taylor 1911*
We really are moving closer and closer to the world predicted by Idiocracy.
Important to note that long before AI, long before surveillance tools were common, corporate America was busy downgrading and eliminating the American tech worker.
Massive numbers of careers were wrecked on the shoals of offshoring and outsourcing which began with IBM and major telecoms decades ago.
Train your replacement, hand in your badge, good luck… and bonuses in the executive suite for „cost savings“ has been ongoing, in fits and starts, since **2000**.
I remember when this happened 25 years ago, I was on the verge of graduating from college and things were at an all time high and then Bill Gates claimed he couldn’t find qualified talent and all of a sudden India took all the work. We do not learn.
So workers will be necessary to implement and train data models and once they are up all the employees are fired. Now what? Your entire company is in the hands of an AI company. Once they start gouging you on credit cost sure there may be some competitor in the AI market but you’ve just fired all your employees and those workers went to different industries or lost skills that were considered outdated. Who’s going to over see the new implementation? What’s keeping that AI company from just doing what you do, offering your same product at a lower rate after you’ve helped train their models? Also if the AI market follows the tech trends of the last 25 years, after the initial bubble pop, companies will consolidate, meaning even fewer competition and higher prices. We’ve already seen this issue with cloud storage and computing. The squeeze will get tighter and tighter and many medium and small size businesses will fail.
Execs see workers as an expense, not as assets.
Tech workers in Silicon Valley are learning today what machinists in Youngstown Ohio learned 50 years ago
Everything in the US seems to be getting dumber.
[ Removed by Reddit ]
Should just be titled the downgrade of america.
Love the picture of that article. Shitty ass shared space.
tech workers need to unionize
What exactly happens when you fire all your staff and nobody can pay for the product you fired everyone to make more profitable?
Yo America is not healthy. This shit has been brewing since Regan. Something has to change or collapse or revolution is coming.
I’m really glad I got into tech at the beginning. It was the wild west back then and they didn’t even monitor what you did online and didn’t have software that tracked you when you worked from home. I’m glad to be out of the game, tbh. It’s gotten way too invasive and complex. I think gen-x lucked out with their generational timing. It’s a mess out there.
It’s backlash to what happened during covid. Pre RTO/layoffs era, white collar workers exercised their labor power by job hopping and moonlighting. And, they were beginning to realize their power in the labor market: demanding structural change (specifically, around DEI pushes), demanding flexibility in working hours, remote work, etc. Remember this whole narrative about „essential workers“? Why was that so short? Why was it only important to point out how essential labor is when people were literally afraid of dying at work?
The backlash to this was swift and coordinated. RTO was never about productivity, it was about crushing nascent organization in the white collar workforce.
Now AI is promising to replace this white collar labor or significantly augment it. I think at some level executives know that AI cannot replace the information economy worker completely. But what it can do is offer a compelling layoff story, not only to investors but also to workers. A big part of suppressing labor is narrative, getting the worker to believe that they are replaceable, and fungible.
Fundamentally, the ‚AI question,‘ no matter which way the technology goes, is a political economy question and a labor power question. If this technology makes white collar professionals 10x more productive or even 1.5x more productive.. we should see a tremendous tightening of the labor market,and increasing salaries! — as companies race to hire, to capture 10x of that value. Like if AI makes workers X% more productive, why on earth would you want to lay them off?
The wave of layoffs we are seeing now is totally decoupled from business performance. You know this, because look at the stock market. FFS these companies have more cash than EVER to hire, AND labor is seeing a step function in productivity? And you’re NOT gonna hire!? Answer that „why“ and you will understand what is going on here.
Unless they pay AI and teach it how to go buy and consume stuff, this is where capitalism falls down and never gets back up.
American tech workers had a golden opportunity in covid to unionize and protect themselves.
Instead they fucked about and it’s all coming to roost.
It’s all just a race to funnel as much money to the tech bros as possible
We never really talk about creating more businesses and opportunities. These old bloated dinosaur companies with a CEO at the top will keep shedding headcount in the midst of record profit, and put folks out in the cold, but I see this as the rebel forces can go out and build the AI native companies to take down there former employers 😃
“Capitalism”
Late-stage Capitalism
It’ll keep happening until the whole thing collapses under its own weight- too much profit to support.