this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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I know at Lemmy we usually don't read the article title and sure as hell won't read the actual article, so I'll just post this here for everyone: nowhere in the article does it say they are laying people off because of AI. It merely states 9000 people will be laid off, and separately MSFT has invested a lot in AI.
A better reframe: huge tech company shifts focus.
I get that, but there are other articles saying the same if not pushing it worse... My point is they are investing large amounts in AI and not people, refocus if you like but for many people AI isn't what they want. Mind you neither is office or Windows....
Don't they lay this amount off every year?
Their workforce is upwards of 200,000. During COVID it was only 100,000. 2006 it was 60,000. But they lay off 9000 and it's because of AI?
Why is this AI and not just business as usual?
I've been saying for a bit that these AI headlines in Lemmy are similar to anti immigrant headlines in Republican social media groups. I feel like this is just more evidence of it. It's yellow journalism tactics
Exactly. Everyone likes to blame AI right now, but the actual reality is that everything has been getting more automated, centralized, efficient, etc. What used to be an entire office of people using typewriters and paper and pens and file cabinets is now a single SQL database with some code doing analysis and reports. What used to be an entire team of programmers and analysts can now be a handful of people using AI and pre built templates or software. AI is just the next evolution of an already existing story of evolving industries. Similarly 1 farmer in an ACed tractor can now sow and reap entire fields of food that used to be hundreds of people for days in the hot sun.
We don't need to be afraid of the technology, but we also don't want to move so fast that we lay off thousands of people all at once and they have no other job to go to.
We COULD, in theory demand that every worker that gets replaced by AI and laid off or fired in any way gets a retirement or UBI or something. Some small cut of their former paycheck, but we all know what is about to happen, the few executives at the top are going to fire more and more people and automate more and more things and collect all of the profits and wealth for themselves and leave the rest of us to starve. But that's what the Republicans want, it's the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" party, which in practice just means screw you, I got lucky and got mine.
The only good thing about AI is that, in theory, anyone could train up their own ML system and profit off what it does. That does give the command person the potential to enter industries they didn't before. Similar to the movable type printing press suddenly opening the way for more people to publish a book. Or the Internet opening the way for me to talk to you where we couldn't have like this 40 years ago.
All of that to say, in a long way, we create more and better technology and tools as a species, it's what we do. We need to embrace that, but also be mindful of what we are creating and for what purposes. Splitting the atom can provide power to entire cities or destroy them. So too could AI provide something good for mankind, but could also destroy.