https://futurism.com/the-byte/cisco-layoff-ai-profit
Cisco posted $10.3 billion in profits last year but is still laying off 5,500 workers as part of an effort to invest more in AI.
The layoff news helped boost Cisco's stock price on Wednesday, going from $45.04 in the morning to spiking over $48 per share in after-hours trading.
And that, dear businessman is why every „middle class” person born after 1980 dreams about operating a guillotine. Fuck all corporations and all investors. Capitalism is bringing to the surface the worst scum of our society.
Stock prices going up when announcing lay-offs has always baffled me. From a pure executive mathematics perspective: profit = revenue - expenses. Employees are expenses, therefore reducing expenses equals more profit.
But from a real-world perspective, employees are the knowledge and effort keeping your company alive. You don't have revenue without employees. So cutting employees is dismantling your business and ruining your ability to function long-term.
I guess that's why CEOs make the big bucks and I don't. They're able to focus on what's happening this quarter, where lowly little ol' me can only think about the big picture.
Yeah. The price boost is from the same day traders looking forward to shorting the stock later.
It baffles me that boards of directors (who ought to have high exposure to the long term stock price) allow this behavior.
I suspect it's because they intend to manipulate the stock price later with a buy-out and because they want to indebt the company to their preferred malicious lender (which they have even more stock in).
Taxing corporations a lot more, is the only way to avoid dystopia. A small island country with 100 factory workers and similar number of supporting jobs/businesses, replaces all the factory workers with robots. Suddenly, no income tax from half the population, with half the population in need of assistance.
Taxing corporations sounds great, but that's not the only way. Worker protections are also a great way to disincentivize layoffs like this. Forcing companies to financially invest in the laid off workers makes a layoff like this less lucrative, and increases the value of the knowledge and skill the workers have gained while working at the company. One goal would be to incentivize retraining workers instead of laying them off.
Everything falls down to bad incentives. Companies need to be financially incentivized (IE forced) to make choices that are good for people.
Indeed. There is no one solution. My little island analogy was a bit too simple.
The main point is to reflect on what would happen when half the population falls outside a productive way to contribute with needs like everyone else: "Crime" skyrockets. The discussion society should have is whether or not the end result is acceptable: Half the population in poverty, and all that wealth consolidated to one family.
The sad thing is that this simplifies what is already the case. This is reality. If the average wage in the US was doubled, it wouldn't exceed anything more than the expected return for increased productivity. Which is insane
It looks like https://layoffs.fyi/ is still doing a great job tracking these things.
Lol where’s all the people saying ai isn’t going to replace anyone. That it’s just a bunch of fear mongering.
I haven't seen AI do anything better than an actual person. I'm completely capable of giving a made up answer without torching a couple acres of rainforest.
"AI" hasn't replaced anyone's job. It's simply being givem as am excuse to do mass layoffs with a vague promose of "future efficiencies" or some bullshit.
The technology doesn't have to be better. It doesn't even have to be "as good as". It just has to be good enough. The main advantage is it can run 24 hours per day, and you can instantly scale up during high demand and scale down for low demand. At the moment they also believe it is cheaper than people. But it is heavily VC subsidized. That cost advantage will quickly disappear when it cone time for profits.
It just has to be good enough.
Given that "good enough" is a very slippery definition, let's say that's true.
AI just isn't good enough. And it doesn't look like it's going to be anytime soon.
Frankly, I don't think these tech behemoths laying off everyone are planning on AI replacing them at all. I think they're outsourcing all those jobs to the lowest priced tech-capable countries they can find. They say "AI" but - even they know that's not going to happen for a number of years at best.
Agreed. It is a scam and a bubble and an excuse to do whatever they really wanted to do in the first place. However they are selling it with the arguments I presented and I'm sure some people believe them.
This is the same argument we had about Automated Teller Machines.
We're looking like, half a century later, the invention of the ATM may soon reduce the total quantity of people employed as bank tellers.
It's really difficult to tell what the long term impact of a new technology will be.
But we can conclusively say, today, that laying people off while citing AI is just assholes being assholes. Today's AI is absolutely not covering the real costs (even at any reasonable fraction) of those layoffs to the future of the company.
For argument, let's put aside the ethics of layoffs,l - even just the shareholders have been better off with more people employed as bank tellers, for a full half century, after the invention of the ATM.
There was a dip in teller employment (fuck around) and a dip in bank profits (find out) after the introduction of the ATM, as well.
The predicted savings may materialize soon, a half century later. But even that is probably 100% due to the separate invention and adoption, and maturity, of online banking.
Anyway. This stuff is weird. But it's fair to call out blaming AI for the current layoffs, as bullshit.
Historically, even the shareholders they're claiming to serve would be served much better by a more conservative approach to retaining trained talent.
I haven't seen AI do anything better than an actual person.
Then you haven't looked very hard.
It's not replacing anyone. It's just an excuse for the usual capitalistic bullshit that they would be doing anyway.
This isn't exactly "replacing" anyone with AI, they're just utilizing AI as an excuse to move money around while reassuring their investors. More than likely just a way to outsource jobs overseas and give management a raise.
Lol, that's a false dichotomy. The original claim was that AI would "replace jobs".
Cisco is like Boeing in that it’s a branch of the US government that inexplicably lets useless executives siphon off “profit”.
At first I read Cysco, and was wondering why a "food distributor" was investing in AI.