[datakan]

It tells you a lot about your execs and how little they care, either for their employees or their customers. The quarterly profits are their God and they will worship at the altar of the stock price.

Instead of finding ways to make AI enhance their employees and make them more productive, they immediately jump to ways to eliminate employees. It's the opposite of a growth mentallity.

I'd love for these executives to show me a time when investing in people was the wrong choice. I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment. This suicidal tendency in the corporate world to constantly decimate your workforce every cycle is just mind boggling and the fact the stock market responds to it so positively is horrifying.

[ravenstine]

They have no reason to care in globalized cultures that are morally bankrupt and have no sense of citizenry to feel any amount of allegiance to. Business leaders were never perfect, but things are at least different when you have a sense that when you treat your employees and customers unfairly that you are treating your extended friends and family unfairly. The atomization of everything means that sense that your business is a part of your own community is pretty much gone. In a society with a decreasingly coherent morality, nothing matters more than cash flow, and there are many ways to make cash flow besides making a good product at a fair price. In an immoral society, leadership benefits from attributed success but suffers not from its failures. Society has given up on accountability beyond a certain scale. The petite bourgeoisie might be punished for misleading the public or screwing its employees, but beyond that it seems we let leaders get away with quite a bit.

And why wouldn't they want to eliminate employees? That's their wet dream! Many business leaders don't see employees as their asset. To them, employees are a necessary evil. If anything, the employer-employee relationship is inherently adversarial. The idea that C-level execs could one day simply talk to an AI and, boom, there's a business with cash flow and no employees, is too attractive for them to pass up, even if the chance is high it doesn't work out. At a personal level, these people have already made their money and are merely there to make more of it. What happens when AI doesn't work out for them and they still need employees? Either they get a pay raise anyway or they get let go and keep their mansions. If they erroneously let a bunch of employees go, then great, they can replace those roles with cheaper workers overseas working remotely. If AI itself can't take the blame for domestic workers losing their jobs, then they can point the finger at Anthropic and OpenAI. Modern workplace hierarchy depends highly on the diffusion of blame, and AI fits into that paradigm by introducing an entirely new dimension to that blame diffusion.

[ryandrake]

These businesses don't see themselves as corporeal parts of the world or as part of their physical, local community. They see themselves as intangible entities - bytes in the ether, spreadsheets, lacking physical substance or matter, immaterial ghosts owned by shareholders. Every other physical thing in the world, living or not, that is not a shareholder's wallet, is a resource to be used, exploited, mined, and discarded.

The Holy Grail is a business that exists without costs, employees, property, equipment, products, or even a physical location--just a virtual blob that increases a share price forever. That's ultimately the (in reality unachievable) goal end-state everyone is trying to at least approach.

[4ff]

Actually the ideal company is one that is a literal money machine - aka just creates money without liabilities - enabling shareholders to lay claim on the cash.

[georgeecollins]

All of these arguments in this thread are essentially attacks on free market capitalism. I am not saying they are unfair, but I think you could have made the same arguments about management and investors doing the same thing in manufacturing in the US. They reduced domestic employment (not in total, but reduced the share and the growth) in manufacturing without regard to employees and communities.

If AI reduces white collar jobs, how can that be bad when automation reducing blue collar jobs is good? It's like suddenly engineers embrace Marxism.

[bigbadfeline]

> All of these arguments in this thread are essentially attacks on free market capitalism.

These argument aren't attacks because one of the basic tenets of free market capitalism is that everyone being greedy for himself is good for everybody. So people saying that corporations care only about profit and not about higher values only reaffirm that basic tenet.

You could try to convince them that they are wrong in their desire to make corporations care about more than money but you cannot blame them for saying something that fully agrees with free market orthodoxy.

> the same arguments hold about management and investors... reducing domestic employment in manufacturing without regard to employees and communities. > If AI reduces white collar jobs, how can that be bad when automation reducing blue collar jobs is good?

First, automaton wasn't the reason for the reduction of US manufacturing, outsourcing was. Wall Street used every leverage to push manufacturing and engineering abroad and that included outsourcing software work. At that time, both workers and engineers criticized the process, so you're factually wrong about that, twice.

Second, their criticism was right because... oh look, we have to bring it all back now, at a great expense paid for... by those same workers and engineers. Because after the big corporations got rich in China they want to come back here and own absolutely everything, including the government and continue the process of disfranchisement of the public by using AI not for higher output but as a cost and workforce reduction tool.

> It's like suddenly engineers embrace Marxism.

This topic has nothing to do with Marxism, which you appear to be using as a smear word, purely mechanically, without any understanding. Marxism has bigger problems but let's not get sidetracked here.

[tunesmith]

I think there's something else psychological going on. What you describe is a rational approach based off of bad values. But I think I'm also seeing something weirdly irrational.

It's like an (emotional) depression or something. Scarcity thinking, the inability to think expansively. People are so sure that everything around them is shrinking that they feel an instinct to hunker down, shrink, and cut as well. Like it doesn't occur to them that they don't have to feel that way. The execs I work with, none of them strike me as spreadsheet-driven greedy people. They seem more freaked out than that.

[amanaplanacanal]

They can feel the contraction coming. They don't know how bad it is going to be. They don't know if their own jobs will survive.

I don't think it's irrational.

[reverius42]

But how can you be so sure a contraction is coming? (And when will it come? Just the idea that there surely will be one, someday, is not scary.)

[amanaplanacanal]

Inflation is heading up, jobs are becoming more scarce. The war in Iran is costing a lot. The federal reserve is now talking about when they are going to raise interest rates, instead of when they are going to lower them.

Plus the incredibly optimistic valuations they are talking up for the big AI company IPOs. If they didn't think we were nearing the top of the bubble, they wouldn't all be planning their IPOs at the same time. It's a race to see who can cash out first before it pops.

It feels similar to 2007-2008. People were talking about a bubble. But nobody wants to jump off the train too early and lose out on the big profits just before the end.

[andy99]

  I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment.

We’ll see how this goes over but I disagree. You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little or at least doing what they want instead of what a business and customers want. This paradoxically ended up creating toxic work environments, and making it impossible to actually get work out of people. We’re seeing a correction now.

[ravenstine]

> You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little

And whose fault is that? When employers create "fun" workplaces, value optics over excellence, disempower management, and maintain the status quo by the diffusion of blame, what sort of employees should they expect to have? I argue that it is not the fault of lazy workers but employers who encourage and tolerate lazy workers who are getting away blame-free. But the message is that it's always the fault of peons rather than the higher rungs of the hierarchy.

[skydhash]

Good work environment is not coddling workers. It’s hard to discuss with people who believe taking care of your employees is catering to their caprices (or more likely, what YOU think they would like)

[treis]

This tracks and IMHO some of the disconnect between technology innovation and productivity is that engineers are soaking up the excess by working less. They're not banging out more code/functionality because by and large that isn't rewarded

[insane_dreamer]

that was driven by seemingly endless amounts of cheap money being thrown at whatever and whoever, which is not at all what "caring for humans and providing a good work environment" means.

[Larrikin]

Can you provide concrete examples?

[wyclif]

It's the opposite of a growth mentality

But to the captains of industry, this is the growth mentality. It's growth--- but only for them, not for the hoi polloi.

[heathrow83829]

i think it's more about cutting costs. Usually, cutting costs when there is opportunity to do so is a lot easier than growing revenue.

[broknbottle]

Jack Welch Disciples