Layoffs in the Tech Industry
If you don’t think mass unemployment is a realistic outcome of AI, you probably aren’t paying attention to the tech industry right now. In the last few years, companies like IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, and dozens of other have laid off massive percentages of their workforce.
Even worse, in many cases, these companies are completely transparent about why, noting that the extra capital is now needed for AI investment, rather than supporting humans that want to work.
As Hinton puts it, the timeline is pretty murky. AI is still quite prone to errors and humans are still generally required to do a lot of the work in the world. But, as the technology evolves, there will be some big changes that require us to reconsider the role of work in the human experience.
