It’s been used as an excuse to lay off people, but not the real reason. They were looking at ways to short term boost stock prices since stock buy backs caused their stock prices to increase, but that boost is fading, they needed another artificial boost to profit to maintain those stock prices.
Surprisingly, they found that the rate of change in the labor market’s makeup in the wake of AI closely matches the pace when computers and the internet were first taking off. In other words, AI doesn’t appear to be more disruptive than those two technologies — at least so far — despite heavy hitters like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei saying that AI will cause massive upheaval in the world and that entire sectors of jobs will be lost forever.
So jobs are being lost to AI, but the job loss is in line with other disruptions, as opposed to being more outsized. I don’t think the emergence of computers and the internet were that un-significant, and there absolutely are job sectors that were lost.
The reality is, its only impact has been as a cover story to conceal jobs that were already going to be cut.
It’s patently ridiculous how many people in positions of authority have parroted talking points about this and laughable how many journalists and publications have uncritically reported those talking points as if they have merit.
And the reason they were actually cut is because monopolists raised prices so that inflation would drive up interest rates, killing competition and labour power, leading to consolidation of the monopolies and fewer jobs and less competition overall.
So, what is it now?
