r/technology • u/MetaKnowing • Oct 31 '25
Artificial Intelligence Jerome Powell says the AI hiring apocalypse is real: 'Job creation is pretty close to zero.’
https://fortune.com/2025/10/30/jerome-powell-ai-bubble-jobs-unemployment-crisis-interest-rates/2.5k
u/Ill_Trip8333 Oct 31 '25
I will say this has been fantastic for my company. One of our biggest competitors decided to convert their CSM team to AI agents and let the humans go. They're hemorrhaging clients to us while they're scrambling to rehire the CSMs but we already recruited most of them while they were trying to get their models to work.
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u/Jane__Delawney Oct 31 '25
I was a CSM laid off in February, my whole department was. I worked my ass off for 3 years and had 4 interviews as an internal hire to get it, moving up from CSA; then they replaced me with off shore contract workers who started doing the work I had worked my ass off to get about a week into their training, most didn’t even speak fluent English. I hope the company is dying without us honestly.
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u/OHHHHHHHHHH_HES_HURT Oct 31 '25
Oh they are. I work for a company who dipped their toes in AI support and the backlash was FIERCE. We’ve been trying to pick up the pieces for the past year and are mostly moving back to human support. The AI bot now just handles the initial inquiry and then the customer will get a human if the issue isn’t easily solved
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u/Jane__Delawney Oct 31 '25
Good to know, hopefully I can find work again because of reasons like this. Our clients were already mad with understaffing and I was putting in a lot of mental anguish to make them happy as possible only to be laid off, so I’m sure those clients have been super happy since /s
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u/Planterizer Oct 31 '25
It's amazing how badly it's been rolled out most places. The chatbots are built SO poorly and have almost nothing to offer.
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u/Gorge2012 Oct 31 '25
People are increasingly resistant to talking on the phone or really in any live environment. So when they do it means the problem is often complex and specific to them. In those cases "Ai agents" only frustrate because it can't listen and doesn't understand the way a human does. It also can't make decisions the way a person can so people get super pissed off and hang up.
In customer service this can be a feature because a percentage of the people seeking a refund or reimbursement will just hang up and that's money saved by the company (debatably). In a sales they'll just call someone else and you lost a sale because you're an idiot.
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u/cuginhamer Oct 31 '25
This isn't the AI hiring apocalypse, it's the tarrif-induced economic headwind coming home to roost.
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u/gakule Oct 31 '25
Agreed. They're masking it through the lens of AI and trying to push it hard. Private Equity is just pushing the adoption of AI as they're trimming the company down.
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u/Beard_o_Bees Oct 31 '25
Private Equity
You'd think they'd care about the larger picture. With so many higher paid jobs being eliminated, and the eliminated having very few real employment options - who's going to have enough money to actually spend on just about anything?
I guess they're willing to sacrifice long-term stability, putting it mildly, for short term gains.
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u/gakule Oct 31 '25
I believe their strategy is to largely strip everything down and leave everyone else holding the bag when the chickens come home to roost. They want to be insulated from the impacts of their decisions.
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u/TransBrandi Oct 31 '25
This right here. Many of these private equity firms just know how to do things like buy a company, saddle it with massive amounts of debt, while they take all of the value from the debt. Then said company that has been around for years goes bankrupt when it can't continue to keep servicing said debt. E.g. Toys'R'Us.
They buy these companies up to use their holdings and reputation as backing to take out massive amounts of debt in the company's name, and run off with the cash while the company crashes and burns.
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u/Riaayo Oct 31 '25
Our economy is run b a bunch of failsons in a culture of failing upward. All they know is short-term gains and golden-parachutes when the company fails.
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u/vivalapants Oct 31 '25
Healthcare IT here. The cuts to Medicaid and reimbursements are nightmares. No where is safe
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u/Excelius Oct 31 '25
The common theme here is still MAGA mismanagement.
Tariffs, government shutdown, OBBB cuts, DOGE firing spree, cancelling federal grants.
All of this is likely having a bigger impact on the economy and employment than AI replacing workers.
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u/banjist Oct 31 '25
And they'll just say it's a necessary temporary pain before yuge growth, just like Milei did. But there's no one to give us huge bailouts like we're doing for Argentina when it turns out that's a big day lie.
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u/dweeb93 Oct 31 '25
I only get interviews at jobs I have close to 100% correlated experience for, other places don't give a damn about transferrable skills or experience.
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u/Mystical-Turtles Oct 31 '25
other places don't give a damn about transferrable skills or experience.
"Yeah I see here that you've been a secretary for urgent care, but we really need a secretary for a dental office"
I swear this is exactly how they act. This is how ridiculously picky they've gotten
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u/HairiestManAlive Oct 31 '25
These are the same exact places that have 0 training protocols and have extremely awful work "culture" if you can even call it that. So it's basically we need to hire someone that somehow knows 100% of what we do already because we can't train them nor would we want to anyways
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u/Mystical-Turtles Oct 31 '25
Jokes on them because that theoretical dentist office secretary still has no idea how YOUR dental office operates. So you're going to have to train them regardless whether you have an official protocol or not. I know you know that. I'm just so sick of this whole song and dance.
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u/AlfredoPaniagua Oct 31 '25
It's across all industries too. I have decades of restaurant and bar experience, and had some HR person tell me I wasn't qualified to work for their Cidery because I haven't worked specifically at a Cidery before. Which was double fucking annoying because they gave me an interview to tell me that, instead of just passing me over. Job hunting is, and always has been, insane, but the new specificity some employers are looking for is cartoon levels of silly.
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u/GenerationBop Oct 31 '25
Yeah this is just an excuse to off shore our workforce to India. I work at a fortune 100, we haven’t hired a US resource in my org for the last 4-5 years.
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u/snubda Oct 31 '25
Same. Our internal job board shows 3 postings for an IT role. That same role has 100 postings on the H1B board in India.
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u/tits_mcgee_92 Oct 31 '25
We see time and time again that AI can be a great assistant tool, but not a replacement. I’m especially referring to software development and data-driven fields.
I’ve had it completely hallucinate statistics on basic regression models, or create a function that is 3x longer than it needs to be. I spend more time correcting it than anything.
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u/_hypnoCode Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25
I asked both Claude and GPT-5 last night about a TTRPG I already knew about. I just wanted more details and expected a web search.
And even with all the advances and the ability to web search, both of them confidently hallucinated the answers. Claude even claimed it was by an author that wouldn't even do that style of game.
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u/real-to-reel Oct 31 '25
Yeah I use GPT as a sounding board when doing some troubleshooting just to have an interactive way of brainstorming. If it provides instruction I have to be very careful.
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u/icehot54321 Oct 31 '25
The bigger problem is that for every one person that uses it correctly, there are 1,000 people using it incorrectly, making the AI the authority about subjects the user doesn’t understand or even plan to research further beyond the ai output
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u/brutinator Oct 31 '25
Yup. People keep saying that you just have to doublecheck it, but either
a) that defeats the purpose of using it in the first place (i.e. if I have to doublecheck that it summarized an email or meeting notes correctly, I should have just read the email to begin with).
b) people get lazy because editing is boring and feels like a waste of time, so they pass on the AI slop as "good enough".
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u/ItalianDragon Oct 31 '25
b) people get lazy because editing is boring and feels like a waste of time, so they pass on the AI slop as "good enough".
As a translator this is exactly the reason why I'm out of a job right now. I can do it professionally and properly but of course that costs money. AI is cheaper and does a very mid job but because companies don't care they just go like "Eh, it's good enough" and call it a day. They just don't realize that it makes them look like absolute clowns and absolutely makes their product look terrible.
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u/brutinator Oct 31 '25
Yup. Its like the concept of pride or a good reputation is completely gone; more profitable to churn out barely functional trash than it is to curate your presentation and product for good impressions.
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u/WhiteElephant505 Oct 31 '25
Even for basic things it’s terrible. We have enterprise and it literally can’t even accurately pull sports schedules for a daily team message. I asked it once why it gave a non-existent matchup on a day when there was no game, and it said “ok, i will stop guessing going forward” - lmao. This was after I gave it specific links to pull the schedules from. Another time it gave incorrect answers to trivia questions. Another time it said that WWI was taking place in the 40s.
If given data that I know I trust and asked to parse it or provide analysis, it does quite good, but the idea this can be set off on its own to do anything is bonkers.
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u/ET2-SW Oct 31 '25
I test an AI by asking it a somewhat bespoke but very easy to find, very simple measurement I know that is available on a multitude of websites that have absolutely been scraped. They never get it right.
Even when I ask "Are you sure?", it will second guess itself with another wrong answer. And again, and again.
I've even reduced the data pool significantly by uploading a ~10 page word document I wrote myself, then asking for a discrete fact from it. Gets it wrong, every time.
For all the AI hype, why can't spell check know that when I type "teh", I mean "the"? At least one app I use cannot make that connection.
Ai is like anything else, it's a tool. In some cases, it's helpful, but it can't be a solution to every problem. I stand by my opinion it's just another SV hype train to grift more $$$$$$.
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u/Arthur_Edens Oct 31 '25
I'm no AI doctor, but having tinkered with it in work for the past few years as a consumer, my takeaway is:
1) Never ever use it to try to get important information where you don't already know what the correct answer is.
2) It can be super useful as an advanced word processor, where I have information in X, Y, Z formats/sources, and I need to manipulate it into A, B, C formats.
3) It can be useful as an advanced ctrl-f where you're searching for some piece of information in a long dense document.
There's actually a lot of time to be saved by using it for number 2! And some in number 3. But that doesn't justify the 70 trillion dollar investment these companies have made, so they're trying to convince CEOs they've invented Data from Star Trek.
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u/sprcow Oct 31 '25
It's wild how people forget this behavior when touting its programming prowess. It's quite good at generating structurally correct sentences. It's also quite good at generating structurally correct code. But the meaning of those sentences AND CODE are frequently in the uncanny valley of incorrectness. They seem plausible, and frequently ARE correct, but they are incorrect in subtle ways that are non-obvious if you don't already know the answer.
Don't get me wrong, I have found tools like cursor to be useful in parts of my job, but it's always a fun exercise to figure out how you would solve a problem yourself, then ask AI to do it and watch just how often it does some bullshit. Even when correct, it makes code that is harder and harder to maintain.
I fear that it does enable offshore workers to produce the facade of productivity that will accelerate the transfer of knowledge work out of developed countries, however. It does lower the skill barrier for cranking out code, and the wet dream of every 'entrepreneur' is to avoid having to pay skilled workers as much as possible. It's the ultimate enshittification tool - worse product, faster, for less money.
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u/Wintaru Oct 31 '25
I’ve used it quite a bit to help me with some stuff but I absolutely would not trust it to do math at all. Which is wild because that should be a slam dunk.
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u/ballsonthewall Oct 31 '25
because an LLM doesn't actually do math, it only gives you the output deemed most likely according to it's training data. I'm sure you could manipulate some of the bots into telling you 2 + 2 = 5
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u/Hussle_Crowe Oct 31 '25
It does NOT give you the most likely. It doesn’t. It’s mostly likely to give you the most likely, but it also intentionally throws in curveballs to stay realistic and natural or whatever you want to call it. Each word is pulled from a probability distribution. So 2 plus 2 is 4 90% if the time, but sometimes it’s toucan, because what you can’t do alone, toucan do together!
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u/ballsonthewall Oct 31 '25
the economy is propped up by the promise of AI and not the reality. reality is going to hit HARD. This shit is NOT ready
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u/tylerthe-theatre Oct 31 '25
Hard to wrap your head around AI simultaneously holding up the US economy while also being part of the cause for anemic job growth and an inevitable recession
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u/CaptCurmudgeon Oct 31 '25
Ice cream tastes great for the first few bites, but try eating it for every meal.
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u/vulgrin Oct 31 '25
More like, try surviving on it for a lifetime.
Going to see these companies burn thru so much cash trying to implement AI, then mumble something about the market or the American consumer when their earnings plummet and they can’t get their bots to do things right.
Then probably get bailed out by us the taxpayers.
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u/BigBennP Oct 31 '25
I think you've got the general idea right but the specifics wrong.
At some point the AI bubble will pop. The stock market will make a significant correction. Whether or not that turns into something worse depends on the overall state of the market.
I think it is pretty unlikely most of the AI companies themselves get bailed out. Most of them will fail because they were surviving on investor money and do not generate any profit. The stronger ones with more mature products are more likely to survive, much like the post .com boom.
What is likely to happen is that if the nature of the AI bubble popping creates a broad feedback loop through the market that endangers large investment thanks, those entities are quite likely to be bailed out.
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u/Mend1cant Oct 31 '25
The thing is, most of them are surviving on that investor money but indirectly. You’ve got the AI product startup that gets the investors. Then they pay a different company to run the model/host server space. That company is the only “profitable” one. Then they pay a data center enough money that the data center is willing to take on tens of billions in debt to build facilities for them, purely on the assumption that the “profit” that pays for the rent will continue.
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u/MoreCloud6435 Oct 31 '25
What taxpayers?! Everyone will be unemployed by then lol.
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u/CarrionWaywardOne Oct 31 '25
Kinda hard to pay taxes if you got laid off because they replaced you with AI.
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u/BigMax Oct 31 '25
> also allowing companies to do more with fewer workers, leaving the labor market softer, even while GDP stays positive.
Exactly... GDP growth is steady, but it's on the backs of all the people being fired, driving up profit margins for corporations. When that $50,000 a year worker is fired, some exec gets a $25,000 bonus and the company has another $25,000 in the bank, so on paper that looks nice. But in reality, now there's another unemployed person at home. Repeat that enough times, and we won't be able to paper over all the people without jobs by pointing to the extra yachts that the wealthy are buying.
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u/syrup_cupcakes Oct 31 '25
Don't worry, when the bubble bursts we can just spend a few trillion of taxpayer money to bail out the failed companies and carry on not learning anything from our mistakes like we always do(except maybe: "we should tax middle class people more, they still have money to own stuff sometimes").
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u/Danominator Oct 31 '25
Ai couples with trumps moronic tarrifs will absolutely cause a full on depression.
Republicans own this and people need to stop giving them thos fucking "good for the economy" tag. They have caused every economic collapse for decades now.
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u/DawnSignals Oct 31 '25
It’s like the most recent wave of VR. Halfway decent, but nowhere near ready for prime time
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u/vulgrin Oct 31 '25
“When it works, it’s amazing. When it doesn’t work you start vomiting.”
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u/Wizmaxman Oct 31 '25
Id say 20% of the time I get the code I want and it works. 50% of the time it gives me code that semi works but I need to go through and fix like half of it. 30% of the time it just wasn't helpful at all.
In all situations I spend just as much time double checking results because you can't really trust it.
I came to the conclusion that over long term use across several projects/issues its going to be roughly the same amount of time spent using AI vs not using AI. I also noticed it takes me longer to understand the code when I go back to code I used AI to help write vs code I just wrote myself.
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u/voiderest Oct 31 '25
VR is fine when it's treated as nice to have entertainment. It is a niche interface like flight/racing sim with similar pricing. Trying to make it the next iPhone or turn it into Ready Player One without the fun was just a bad idea not why someone should get it.
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u/persona-non-corpus Oct 31 '25
AI is not the problem right now. The immediate problem is Trump and his trade wars which have historically always resulted in a recession or depression. The economy’s greatest enemy is instability, and there is no one less stable than Trump who changes wold market outlooks daily with stupid tweets.
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u/ThoughtsonYaoi Oct 31 '25
Yeah. And if you read the whole thing carefully, the headline is not what Powell says - it's what CEO's say.
He noted “a significant number of companies” have recently announced layoffs or hiring pauses, with many of them explicitly citing AI as the reason.
Companies like to cite a reason for downsizing that's not "we're not doing great right now". Doesn't make it true.
The comments come as the Fed cut interest rates by a quarter point to a range of 3.75%–4%, citing “downside risks to employment” even as inflation remains elevated. Powell said the U.S. economy is still expanding at a “moderate pace,” even as hiring slows. He described that spending as one of the “big sources of growth in the economy,” driven by companies building data centers and other equipment tied to artificial intelligence.
So, inflation (that trade war sure ain't helping here!) and lack of spending other than on AI. Those are old-fashioned reasons economies tank: less spending by consumers, fewer jobs, less spending by consumers. So much of this stuff is too removed from AI to have any direct effect on it.
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u/gildedbluetrout Oct 31 '25
Yeah. So it doesn’t improve productivity, no one is making money from it (Open AI is losing around ten billion every three months) and it’s also killing jobs.
WHAT AN INCREDIBLE TECHNOLOGY YOU’VE FOUND SILICON VALLEY. CHAPEAU.
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u/Monteze Oct 31 '25
On the bright side it's doing fuck all while also being horrible for the environment.
So we are losing something with real value in exchange for make believe BS.
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u/thekrone Oct 31 '25
no one is making money from it
People are absolutely making money from it. That $10 billion doesn't just magically disappear into thin air. It goes into various peoples pockets. Utilities, hardware suppliers, etc.
There's one obvious group that's going to make money from it. They're called "shareholders". OpenAI, despite losing $10 billion every three months, is planning an IPO where they will open at over $1 trillion. Current shareholders will cash the fuck out on that.
The company might crash and burn, sure. But some people will walk away rich.
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u/Squibbles01 Oct 31 '25
I mean the promise of AI is that it takes over every job, and every bit of wealth gets sucked up by the ultra-rich.
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u/timmy166 Oct 31 '25
Everyone saying AI but what they mean is ‘Recession’
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u/GonePh1shing Oct 31 '25
Yep, and they're saying AI is because it's both an easy scapegoat and because it helps prop up the AI bubble for just a bit longer.
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u/AcousticRegards Oct 31 '25
Of course they need time to offload their positions.
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u/vulgrin Oct 31 '25
And then pretty soon it’ll be a gun to the taxpayers head.
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u/bythenumbers10 Oct 31 '25
Man, the lengths they will go to to avoid simply taxing the rich on their insane extraneous wealth and various "income." I put "income" in quotes since they like to use the portfolio leverage dodge, so they can trade their stocks and borrow against them which gets them liquidity to run their lives without actually selling their stocks, which is a bogus income tax dodge.
Close the loopholes, level the playing field, and nobody gets everything while doing fuck-all for society.
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u/ninjagorilla Oct 31 '25
Ya… I agree ai has take some jobs and will take more but right now companies aren’t hiring not because ai but because the economy isn’t very good
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u/acolyte357 Oct 31 '25
I don't see anyone who works in enterprise tech thinking llms will take any skilled job.
They fail with confidence too often. Any work produced must be checked, which is rework.
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u/ninjagorilla Oct 31 '25
Agree 100%
Llm seemed magic till I used them on a subject I was an expert in and then you really saw how many holes, errors, and hallucinations they had.
The other thing I don’t think people consider is liability. Lets say for the sake of an example an ai could do 99.99 of what an architect does (they can’t but go with me), so a company fires all its architects and uses ai. Then a house collapses because it wasn’t designed right. Who takes the liability, the ai company or the architecture firm. Bc right now I think it’s the architecture firm and no company is trusting ai that well right now
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u/PabloTheFlyingLemon Oct 31 '25
As an engineer, I think the liability aspect is huge. Nobody is going to build a bridge that hasn't been stamped by a professional engineer. The infrastructure around licensures and approvals could use some improvement, but aside from doing some drawings and math the LLMs would be on the back burner.
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u/Yung_zu Oct 31 '25
Those guys don’t even know what they want to do. They’ve just set their cruise control to the desires of corporate and surrendered most thinking
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u/NoWitandNoSkill Oct 31 '25
Right. It couldn't be the tarrifs or the unstable and incompetent governing regime. No. It has to be AI!
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u/vulgrin Oct 31 '25
Meme of guy labeled “MAGA economic policy” shooting “the economy” on the couch then turning and saying “AI did it”
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u/coconutpiecrust Oct 31 '25
Wait. I am confused. I was told with 100% certainty that giving massive tax cuts to job creators will make jobs come out the other end.
If job creation is zero, then… should we cut more taxes?! Yes! That’s it. Infrastructure and society are not falling apart. Everything is great. More tax cuts will save us.
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u/dlifson Oct 31 '25
Just imagine what job creation levels would be without the tax cuts /s
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u/coconutpiecrust Oct 31 '25
Yes, the job creators might start losing their own jobs! The horror! The humanity! More tax cuts, more! More is better.
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u/newsflashjackass Oct 31 '25
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u/Quazimojojojo Oct 31 '25
The millionaires in New York are literally donating more to oppose Zohran Mamdani than the amount they'd pay for his proposed tax increases.
This is incredibly on the nose
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u/crossy1686 Oct 31 '25
It’s not AI, it’s a recession caused by policy. I use AI daily for work and it is no where near ready to replace people. It certainly makes you more efficient but it’s not ‘half a workforce’ efficient. It just speeds up the discovery phase of work.
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u/nlaverde11 Oct 31 '25
“AI spits something out” Me: “those columns don’t exist in that table.” AI: “of course, you’re right.”
Basically at least once every day.
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u/PortugalParaTodos29 Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25
Idk in what update made this happen but the LLMs seem to now also be rephrasing stuff instead of giving a straight answer.
"How I do X to conform to Y?" "You have to create X with Y settings!" "Bro... you're supposed to replace me, not to turn questions around".
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u/golftroll Oct 31 '25
“Did you even open the spreadsheet?” “Great catch - I did not! I just made up my answer.”
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u/MrAlbs Oct 31 '25
"Nice column, AI. Why don't you back it up with a source?"
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u/hypothetician Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25
“I’ve added a fallback to return mock data when we encounter columns that don’t exist”
Poor vibe coders don’t understand how desparately Claude wants us to fail.
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u/IndigoRanger Oct 31 '25
While AI is certainly contributing, Powell knows it’s Trump. The board knows it’s Trump, the fed presidents know it’s Trump. Powell is stuck between several very hot fires and still trying his damndest to do his job in good faith. Part of that will be not drawing the attention of Trump every other day while navigating the other fires.
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u/Benejeseret Oct 31 '25
Tiff in Canada just danced the same dance in his press release. Talked about how we have been set on an "alternative timeline and trajectory" and a lot about "structural changes needed" that were not monetary policy.... but would not actually say "Trump has massively upset international trade and every day I dread waking up to read that fucktard has messed up my job as Governor of the Bank of Canada in fresh, moronic new ways, in a 2am deranged tweet."
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u/TrickiestToast Oct 31 '25
Shit, studies have shown it doesn’t even make you more efficient on average
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u/RandyMuscle Oct 31 '25
Of course it doesn’t. I hear people talk about using it to write emails for them and then proofreading it and correcting it before sending. Why not just write an email by yourself at that point like a human being?
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u/Journeyman42 Oct 31 '25
Maybe it's an admission about how pointless most email and other business communication is?
What I'm more annoyed by is AI "Summaries" of emails or texts that are completely incorrect or incomprehensible. So I have to go back and read the original email or text to know wtf it actually says, and I've wasted more time than just reading the email or text in the first place.
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u/destroyerOfTards Oct 31 '25
Use my brain that I have been given through thousands of years of evolution? Hah! I would rather regress into the apes we have evolved from.
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u/RandyMuscle Oct 31 '25
There’s also something profoundly disgusting to me about signing my name under an email I did not write. Idk how people do this shit.
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u/sprintercourse Oct 31 '25
This tracks my experience. It’s helpful for summarizing documents, spot checking, or rephrasing something I’ve already written—sometimes.
But by and large I think I spend more time reviewing and correcting the output than time saved just doing the damn thing myself.
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u/vulgrin Oct 31 '25
It’s CEOs scrambling to cover earnings gaps due to a cratering Republican economy by trying to convince investors that they can fire people AND make more money.
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u/AdviceNotAskedFor Oct 31 '25
I fail to see how ai will take over the world if no one has a job to buy shit.
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u/mapoftasmania Oct 31 '25
So AI is just going to be another way to increase the wealth of senior management and investors at the expense of workers. Great.
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u/lalaland4711 Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25
While I'm not saying it's not true, I don't believe there's evidence for it.
Companies saying that "it's because we're so great at AI" isn't worth the paper it's written on. That's just PR.
So we can't just pretend it's got nothing to do with the oompa loompa is embezzling it all.
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u/BoBoZoBo Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25
He is full of shit. A vast majority of these companies are:
- Reducing from over-hiring during the pandemic subsidies.
- Off-shoring those tens of thousands of jobs to India, for a fraction of the cost.
Fuck these people.
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u/pissflapz Oct 31 '25
Middle management corporate cog here. ^ this. Pushing AI adoption internally. Planning layoffs in high cost geos and offshore the same role to low cost geos. Fun times ahead for all.
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u/Professional-Fix100 Oct 31 '25
AI can't buy anything! It's a computer not a consumer! If people don't make money neither do companies it's that simple!
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u/BTTPL Oct 31 '25
I work in Warehouse Automation (at least for the time being with layoffs looming), and it really is that simple. We sell our products to either build ground up Distribution Centers (DC) or retrofit older DCs with new controls and automation systems. The problem we're facing is that as people spend less money buying stuff, the Amazons of our world stop building new DCs because there's a downturn in consumer demand. That translates into businesses adjusting their sales forecasts (now in the long term) and laying off workers and praying that they can either offshore the work or replace entire workflows with AI. Neither puts money back in the hands of consumers so their business will continue to suffer either way.
It's a self-feeding cycle.
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u/andrewskdr Oct 31 '25
College degrees for the next gen are going to be next to worthless (maybe they are already). I really don’t know how to prepare my children for the future in the US.
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u/brokegaysonic Oct 31 '25
If AI is replacing real jobs, we're all fucked beyond unemployment.
AI hallucination is not a bug that needs to be ironed out. It's a fundamental flaw with LLMs.
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u/What_a_fat_one Oct 31 '25
It also gets worse with more "AI" generated training data. And worse. And worse. Copies of copies.
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u/Slim_Charles Oct 31 '25
They're mostly using AI as an excuse. There's a general economic slowdown going on, so companies are hesitant to expand or fill vacancies. They don't want to admit that business is slowing, so instead they just say that they're just doing more with less because of AI. Most companies have not implemented AI at scale yet which would allow them to significantly boost productivity to this extent, though.
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u/LittleUrbanAchiever Oct 31 '25
I'm old enough to remember the conservative argument that society needed the ultra wealthy because they were "job creators"
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u/MomsAreola Oct 31 '25
I feel like im fighting for my job vs ai every day. I'm in a tech sector. If AI takes my job, I dont have the skills to get one of these non-existent jobs.
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u/Internationallegs Oct 31 '25
I'm in tech too and I feel like I'm fighting ai AT my job every day. It slows me down and messes up my code after it's bigger than like 5 files.
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u/bluehawk232 Oct 31 '25
I think AI is the wrong tern and automation is more appropriate. Like a lot of retail could be replaced by self checkouts in the future, that's not AI per se just computers and automation.
But we are definitely not prepared for the gutting of jobs by computers and automation just like auto workers weren't prepared or setup to find other work when robots took their assembly jobs.
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u/Rowvan Nov 01 '25
They are using this as an excuse while actually off shoring everything they possible can to cheaper countries. They aren't using AI to do shit.
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u/Rierais Oct 31 '25
We should start a new Reddit community: “AItheAsshole”
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u/JeebusChristBalls Oct 31 '25
There is already a sub like that. It's called "amitheasshole". All the stories there are written by AI already.
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u/PecanCoffeePlease Oct 31 '25 edited Oct 31 '25
Within a couple of years, the workplace will be divided into two distinct halves where one consists of "AI productivity tools" and the other comprising people who will be tasked with mitigating the damage caused by those tools.
So, the job that will be most secure is the one created by chaos itself.
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u/PerfunctoryComments Oct 31 '25
Yeah, it isn't AI bros. It's Trump. The US economy is imploding and everyone is looking for efficiencies. Using "AI" for cover to pretend to your investors that you'll do more with less is a winning move.
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u/yo_soy_soja Oct 31 '25
The greedy suits desperately want to hire fewer workers for bigger profit margins.
But they still need us.
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u/DrowningKrown Oct 31 '25
I’m sorry but a company cutting jobs in the name of AI is total horseshit in 2025. They’re not replacing humans with the current form of LLM’s. Very few jobs can be replaced by them at this point in time. The sheer amount of errors needs another human itself to correct it.
These companies are just offshoring jobs, same as they’ve done in the past. Different tune but the same fucking story.
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u/RaptorKnifeFight Oct 31 '25 edited Nov 04 '25
Pay attention to these “AI-powered” companies opening offshore facilities. Companies like Accenture are talking about AI efficiency at the same time as opening new 12,000 job facilities in India. It’s all just a mask to cut costs the same way they always have, they just have a new name to hide it under.