"“It’s a fever,” Gina Raimondo, the former governor of Rhode Island and commerce secretary under Joe Biden, told me, referring to the rush to cut jobs. “Every CEO and every board feels like they need to go faster. ‘We have 40,000 people doing customer service? Take it down to 10,000. AI can handle the rest.’ If the whole thing is about moving fast with your eye strictly on efficiency, then an awful lot of people are going to get really hurt. And I don’t think this country can handle that, given where we already are.”
Like Hoffman, Raimondo occupies an unusual niche: a Democrat who can walk into a boardroom without setting off the cultural metal detectors. She co-founded a venture-capital firm, and AI executives, who see her as pragmatic and fluent in tech, are willing to talk to her. “This is a technology that will make us more productive, healthier, more sustainable,” Raimondo said. “But only if we get very serious about managing the transition.”"
This is just tech illiterate c-suites who use chatgpt on their couch thinking its drag and drop.
Reality is eventually going to set in....
Certainly things like call centers may get hit but I think across all industries unemployment is going to be single digit percentage points.
Unfortunately, these CEOs are relying on "industryfluencers" like a former governor and commerce secretary to tell them what's what. The FOMO is real, so if you say "you may be able to save 75% in labor costs over time but you gotta approach it slowly", they stopped listening at
costs.If there's a hard time we'll get through it, but over my dead body that my competitor is going to produce with 1/3rd my overhead; that will kill my business.
Race to the bottom?
Yep, I'm fully expecting we are going to have to go thru a 2-3 year period where things start to really suck (nothing works and you can't contact any human to explain why it doesn't work)...slowly sanity will creep back in.