[hydroplane]

I often wonder how different AI sentiment would be today if all of the layoffs that were opportunistically blamed on AI by the company CEOs were instead blamed on the real reason (likely pandemic related over hiring). The root of the backlash started as a result of all those “AI” layoffs and the hyperscaler CEOs gloating how everybody was going to lose their job due to AI. So in the end, they reap what they sow. A growing backlash that is not going away anytime soon.

[tptacek]

I think you'll find the American public is less motivated by how well-treated Mag7 software developers believe themselves to be.

[linkregister]

The public statements of frontier labs' CEOs that generative models will replace human workers have been front page news for months.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the American public is less motivated by how well-treated Mag7 software developers

SWE layoffs are politically irrelevant. The kids booing commencement speakers, however, are not aspiring SWEs. AI CEOs’ rhetoric, in particular, Altman’s, has been aimed and successfully landed more broadly.

And I don’t think the underlying cause of the anxiety is unemployment, which remains relatively low. Finding a block of hard-working workers who used to be able to make ends meet, but now can’t, is a political goldmine for good reason.

[moregrist]

It’s not about that.

It’s the constant drumbeat of “AI will take your job.”

It’s the constant news of “layoffs because AI makes us more productive.”

It’s the constant background discussion of UBI because no one will have jobs anymore.

It’s knowing that, in the US, UBI will never come.

It’s the feeling that the billionaires of Silicon Valley are getting rich and there isn’t even a “learn to code” path to wealth anymore.

It’s knowing that data centers will create problems in your neighborhood: the price of power and water will go up, the amount of undeveloped land down, and you don’t even get jobs out of it.

For fuck’s sake, it’s not about the thousands of Mag7 tech workers losing their jobs. That’s just a symptom, like all the other symptoms, of this weirdly dystopian future that the AI companies keep telling us is inevitable.

[Danox]

You left out the computer gamers crowd are mad about the high price of memory, a group that is a very vocal crowd in all the tech circles.

[kiba]

This is assuming AI will take our jobs as opposed to making more mess for us to clean up.

[pa7ch]

I'm worried many companies no longer care much if they make a mess or a way to hold them accountable.

[pabs3]

Thats the entire history of companies right there though? They have always socialised costs, privatised profits.

[throwaway27448]

Mag7?

[JaakkoP]

Magnificent 7, the new FAANG where Netflix got swapped to NVIDIA and Tesla got added.

[throwaway27448]

Jeez, we could have chosen a less, erm, crassus-reminiscent acronym

[JohnFen]

Yeah, it's a term I won't use because of how awful and obsequious it is.

[themafia]

You take a non working technology and threaten workers with it as part of a global scheme to depress wages, and hey, bonus, the technology probably appears smart because it just wantonly steals everyone else's work and then passes it off as it's own.

How different would AI sentiment be if this never happened?

It wouldn't exist.

Who would buy this?

Show me any "little guy" suddenly competing with the "big guys" due to "AI." Any single examples? Remember the dawn of the internet? Where this very thing was happening every day?

The writing is on the wall. People imagine they're going to turn their $2500 computer into a butler and never work again so their brains are just shut off to the obvious.

[rsanek]

Pandemic-related over-hiring was corrected by end of ~2023, if you look at employment growth rates pre-pandemic. [1] I'm more inclined to believe that it is AI (or, at least, the expectation by CEOs of what AI will be).

[1] https://robulka.com/employees/

[disgruntledphd2]

> I'm more inclined to believe that it is AI

So for the Mag7 it's kinda AI, in that they want to maintain margins and invest loads more into capital for AI infrastructure. Those layoffs clearly have AI associated with them.

For lots of other tech, I'm not sure. I do believe that productivity can increase in a bunch of places with AI tooling, but you need to build that tooling first, then monitor and ensure that it continues working. Like, the vast majority of tech companies already outsourced a lot of what AI tooling would/could do, so I'm somewhat sceptical of the rationale (AI is so good we can cut 20% of our staff).

[wvenable]

The only way AI recoups the investment is if it replaces all our jobs.

It might be literally impossible but that's what the numbers are.

[ivantop]

The pandemic over hiring that ended 4 years ago?

[xboxnolifes]

I wonder if people will continue blaming things on pandemic over-hiring in 2030.

[tom_]

Things take time to play out!

[MattDamonSpace]

Yes

[bdangubic]

industrial revolution also played a part too? :)

[heavyset_go]

No one wants to be the one to ring the "we're in a recession" bell first

[ChiperSoft]

I think once it's more than a year it's officially a depression

[Sparkyte]

They are opportunistic. They are using it as a scapegoat to lay off people they over-hired for for the growth they had during COVID. They are also using it as a scapegoat to offshore more and more labor.

[clumsysmurf]

Another part of the problem is our lax regulatory "anything goes" environment which puts no guardrails on how AI can be used / abused. For example, eventually nearly everyone needs healthcare, and the idea you might be denied by AI or fighting AI to get a claim accepted is unpopular.

[jacobn]

So far it seems like AI is helping the little guy fight the bills more?

(That can of course change very quickly, yes)

[mgh2]

The best people can do is to "vote with the wallets" aka attention: like social media, avoid using AI altogether no matter how "pervasive" they become, they will soon realize they won't need it as much as they think- overcome the addiction and brainwashing...

[sapphicsnail]

Maybe in a normal world where a company's valuation is based in some sort of material reality.

[rob74]

The real reason is "make number go up". A few years ago, you showed the stock market (or your investors if you weren't listed yet) how amazing a company you were by hiring people like crazy, even if you didn't need them, and giving them all sorts of perks, including (but not limited to) home office. Now, the stock market wants to see blood, so you have to sacrifice people - not because you're actually losing money, but because you're not making as much profit as the stock market thinks you should, and therefore your shares are "underperforming".

[Sparkyte]

This tactic is wearing thin on investors. All companies doing layoffs as of recent have started to lose share value. AI or not.

I think investors are starting to see stress on the market for fewer working people contributing back as customers and investors themselves. This creates depreciation in share value as no one is willing to invest.

[gofreddygo]

It helps to think of investors in tiers. The lower tiers mimic higher ups. Each tier has two orders of magnitude deeper pockets than the lower tier.

At the very top are the big investment banks and fund houses, berkshire. Second are smaller institutions and third retail/individual.

The top two layers demand a steady return, never losing money on average in any 36 month window. Otherwise it triggers a selloff top down to cover for it.

The bottom follows the top so the selloff or buy just gets mimicked, with the top tier never losing (the bottom layers make sure of it by following blindly)

With wild indicators already set a massive selloff should have already been in motion, but its not. The top tier is getting more greedy.

No one is betting on AI long term. Everyone's in for the ride. As always the bottom will feed the top.

[Sparkyte]

Also to add investors know stock can't keep winning. They will diversify before too long and doing more splits does not ensure more value as it depreciates.

Nvidia is worth so much if it fails it takes investments with it. The risk is too high.

[gofreddygo]

yes I don't like the term investor anymore, because there aren't anymore. in my mind I just switch the word to a compulsive gambler or at best a speculator. and everything else is just bots.

[wcxcv]

Ahem, the word trader fits it lol

[librasteve]

this “square wave” effect is driven by interest rates … when the bank rate is very low investors will tolerate high level of gambling on growth (ponzi-like). as soon as money will grow anyway in the bank, then investors demand actual RoI

[hyperadvanced]

It’s hard to square this with the post 2024 AI-investment economy. Interest rates have stayed higher longer than expected, while many, many companies (Vercel, Cursor, Wave-whatever that got bought out last year, whatever Alexandr Wang’s thing) got billion dollar valuations with no path to profitability and no revenue.

It seems that ROI has become more important in the last 5 years, but then again you have these Space or Rare Earth shitcos trading at -200x PE while all of their industrial promise is directly undermined by rising costs from AI.

The likely forecast for this year is either rate hikes combined with further labor market deterioration and consumption somehow going negative, or inflation eating up all of the (still non existent) profits from AI mega caps themselves.

It’s hard to see how this ends well without a lowered cost of capital or more interest in taking on capex risk, which seems frankly unlikely. The worst case scenario seems to be a lot of bad debt with nobody except for perhaps Berkshire or China who would be interested or capable when it comes to salvaging it. Armchair economist here, grain of salts a plenty.