this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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More accurate headline: Stupid CEOs who believe hype about tech they don't even remotely understand fire a bunch of workers because they don't think they need them anymore.
These same morons are going to be hiring back most of the people they fired in a year or so after it becomes apparent that none of this is going to work even remotely like they think it will.
For CEOs it's all about the bottom line. Let's say a print magazine lays off a bunch of writers and replaced them with AI. Readership will likely drop due to the quality drop and people not buying the magazine on principle. Let's say it's a 10% revenue drop, but they already cut costs by 35% with all the layoffs. If they come out as more profitable that's a win for them.
I mean Amazon gets shittier by the day but continue to grow their margins and market share. Products don't need to be good to sell, they need to be "good enough".
The thing with Amazon is that its primary selling point isn't the goods on the site, it's convenience. Amazon is relatively cheap, fast, and easy. As long as it continues to be cheap, fast, and easy, people are willing to overlook poor quality to a point. It's the same formula that Walmart used just applied to online shopping.
You need to understand why people buy your products in order to know where you can cut corners. If for instance you're already more expensive than your competition, but your product quality or features are superior, you can't really afford to cut down your quality, unless you're willing to undercut your competition on price as well. Depending on your margins and unit costs you may not be able to even do that.
Assuming a 10% revenue drop is probably optimistic, particularly with how much backlash generative content is receiving right now. There are quite a few companies dealing with PR shitstorms right now because they got caught using generated images or articles. There are a lot of parallels at the moment with the NFT craze and how executives rushed to cash grab on that trend only to immediately backtrack when public opinion flipped practically overnight. The only silver lining for these executives in this case is that there actually are a ton of legitimate uses for this tech, unlike NFTs which have vanishing few worthwhile uses.
This is only true if you ignore all the other variables. Which is, let’s say, another company hiring writers and now they’ll grow their market share in comparison with the shitty AI articles company.
Amazon has a lot of competition in Brazil and the more they make their service worse, the better for the competition. But so far Amazon only raised the bar (with fast deliveries), making all other companies improve their own services.
Amazon already bought that company.
Companies are going to hype up AI then fire some staff to get a stock bump & Management high-fives themselves with bonuses. Weeks later contract offers will come up for some odd title but will be the equivalent of a VBA programmer role to help improve the terrible AI responses.
The cost will go up and some web service company will come out to hype it up as a service. The companies that laid off won't admit that this was unnecessary. So a consortium of those companies will got to industry events pitching about how this is all Web 4.0 growing pains to give the customer a more "collaborative" delivery mechanism or something buzz-worthy like that.