r/BlackPeopleTwitter • u/imjustheretodomyjob ☑️ 🧚🏿 Reclaiming my peace 🧘🏿 • 1d ago
Boo-effin-hoo for them
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u/heatherjasper 1d ago
It's so lame that, instead of implementing better wages and benefits, companies would rather yeet several millions of dollars into a clunky, stupid system that everyone else knew would ultimately fail. And then they go back to human workers anyway.
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u/outsidehere 1d ago
If there's any possibility that an employer can replace you without losing your performance and keeping costs down, they will pull that trigger every single time
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u/alwayssunnyinskyrim 1d ago
We’ve learned that they will pull that trigger regardless of performance. They will happily take a non-functioning AI over a hardworking employee right up until the AI costs more money.
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u/outsidehere 1d ago
Exactly. You're right. If there's a chance to get you off the books, they will do it. It may backfire and cost them way more than it'd cost to employ you but they don't care
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u/rmslashusr 1d ago
I don’t know why that’d be surprising or even controversial. I don’t see any households shunning digital photos because they feel bad about the people they used to pay to develop their film rolls. No one is going to pay another person for results they can achieve without labor through technology, whether that’s companies or individuals
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u/MrSnippets 1d ago
If a Company could choose between raising their workers‘ wages for 1 Million Dollars or invest 1 Million Dollars into Union-busting, they‘ll choose the latter everytime.
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u/ShikaMoru 1d ago
Its always "business" when it comes to them sacrificing you but they're "family" when its you not prioritizing them
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u/Noblesseux 1d ago
I think part of it is that the c suites (and frankly big parts of middle management) don't actually know what their employees do and what the complexities of their jobs are because they never talk to them.
When you look down on people like that, it's very easy to convince yourself that you can super easily replace them because "they're just making updates to the website" or whatever because you don't know all the complexities involved in that job. But when you try to swap them for AI, suddenly all of that institutional knowledge an experience that was baked into that worker is now something that you have to figure out.
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u/TheMagicalMatt 1d ago
And it's only because of expensive bills and insufficient living conditions that people went back to those jobs. These companies would crumble if we weren't bullied into accepting the bare minimum.
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u/RedditGreenit 1d ago
The AI grift was capital trying to seize back the gains labor made during the "essential worker" and "work from home" era COVID provided. Nothing shocks the "bootstrap" mentality than realizing you're not a generous "Job creator", and that your success as a owner relies on the labor of your employees.
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u/AncientCrust 1d ago
One can only believe the bootstrap mentality if they know nothing about labor history. The lengths employers will go to to avoid fair wages is insane. Soldiers, machine guns and a couple times, even bombing from planes.
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u/unicornfairyprincess 22h ago
I believe this 100%. Labor gained the upper hand and here comes capital smacking us back down with surpluses, RTO, and now AI
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u/patientguitar 1d ago
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u/MuffinPuff ☑️ 1d ago
This is damn near verbatim the experience I had with the AT8T AI chat system last week.
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u/GeniusOfLove74 Dominic Monaghan stalker 👀 1d ago
Oh, we're suddenly 'essential' again. I think I've heard this somewhere before, maybe in 2020?
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u/__JDQ__ 1d ago
This feels like how self-checkout has cost many businesses more than they projected they would save.
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u/Tasty-Mulberry8073 1d ago
They brought self checkout to costco recently. It started off like a normal self check out for small orders. It must have gotten backed up or people were shoplifting because now they have people walking around with scanners who scan all the stuff in your basket and then tell you to go to the self checker and scan your card and your order pops up and you pay. So I guess do it your self didn't work out for them.
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u/Capital-Self-3969 1d ago
A lot of these people went full Captain Planet villain the moment they had a chance to dump people for AI.
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u/877-HASH-NOW 1d ago
AI is backfiring on these corporations and somehow their greed made them the only ones blind to it. We all saw this shit coming.
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u/WhompBiscuits 1d ago
That's always been the whole point of technology, for 200 years. Not to help workers, make them more efficient, etc. But to replace them entirely. Capitalists have always loathed workers, but need them because, well, they do the actual work. Whereas capitalists largely never.
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u/JPMoney81 1d ago
Anyone who lost their job to AI and has the employer come crawling back should say 'sure, I'll come back as soon as you let me unionize' and watch the employers turn various shades of angry.
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u/Mammoth-Glove3273 1d ago
And when the bubble bursts they’ll turn to us with their hands out for our tax dollars to save them.
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u/Haywoodjablowme1029 1d ago
I'm a paramedic, so far, I can't think of any job duties that AI can take from us, but I am sure the finance people are trying to find them.
I would be cool with self driving ambulances however, then my partner and I could both be doing patient care, and I like having help with that.
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u/MycologistSubject689 1d ago
I'm getting let go from a job I started in June because "they're leveraging AI to better fit business need" and 60% of the jobs I've looked at are all AI training. What the fuck are we DOING.
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u/rubber_moon 1d ago
I'm so glad I found a strong union job in the dev field. I'd be very anxious right now if I hadn't. F all these companies and governments, they're not your friend and you should hold them to account at every turn. Case in point, our pension pot is doing very well, it's in surplus, but they just had to investigate whether they should increase our contributions for the fun of it. Their independent report recommended just leaving things as they were but they still have this as an open thing that needs fixing.
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u/stanley_leverlock 1d ago
Coworker: Hey could you read through this and tell me-
Me: NO, I'm not your AI proofreader.
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u/Elect2Toss ☑️ 1d ago
“If we could all rewind … we would have introduced [this] in a more thoughtful, slow way.”
The actual article was basically about higher ups admitting that maybe they'd moved too fast and that AI isn't the great replacement they thought it was. You know, things we could have told them if they ever cared to listen to employees.
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u/Wasteofskin50 1d ago
True, but it is not like this is a new thing with employers.
They just thought that they finally had the magic bean... a worker who has no needs other than to work.
TB-SS!!
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u/Sorry-Secret-2347 1d ago
Smh those job postings…. Hey i know we fucked up but…… we need humans again
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u/Rude-Asparagus9726 1d ago
AI is great, but people are in WAY too much of a rush to implement it...
We need, at the minimum, basic checks on all AI output to ensure quality. I don't know why quality assurance went out the window for us the second robots got involved, but it's still just as important as it always was...
AI is a tool, it will not do the exact work you want for you.
It can HELP by doing a lot of the common, tedious, but ultimately easy work, but YOU still need to add the finishing touches and guidance, and also review the most complex things...
That's something Pros AND Antis seem to have trouble accepting...
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u/Consistent_Turn_42 1d ago
Yep, we are pushed to use AI on everything. It spend more time directing AI on what to do while I could have just done it myself.
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u/Careless-Balance-893 ☑️ 1d ago
Didn't Kroger just lay off a bunch of people recently because of ai?
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u/HTC864 ☑️ 19h ago
This shouldn't be a don't forget because of this particular instance. People should always understand that companies are not good or bad, they simply exist to make money. Your usefulness has always been and will always be to their bottom line. Their usefulness to you should always be to whatever your needs are.
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u/ribbitman 1d ago
They're not pulling back though. This is made up. Most employers are embracing it. As they should.
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u/loki2002 1d ago
They really shouldn't be. It is a fad and just like every other tech fad the bubble will burst and people will move on.
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u/LoppyNachos 1d ago
Just like how people moved on from the internet right?
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u/loki2002 1d ago
Just like how people moved on from "Internet of Things" and 3D TVs. Not to mention the dot-com bubble burst.
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u/LoppyNachos 1d ago
And yet we still use the internet everyday, just like AI will continue to get used everyday. I dont know why so many people think that "tHe BuBbLe BuRsTiNg" means all the technology and infrastructure is just gonna disappear overnight and nobody will ever talk about AI again
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u/Pimpwerx ☑️ 1d ago
...for now.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but agents are getting better. This is still very early days for AI. Agents will take your desk jobs. And once robots are more dexterous and power efficient, then they'll come for all the low-end jobs.
People are getting tricked into complacency because the first jobs being lost to AI are in the tech sector. But that's because that sector understands how to use agents better, so are more capable of replacing humans. But just wait for that entry bar to continue being lowered, while performance and efficiency of agents increases. There are not many jobs an AI-powered robot can't do. People need to take that very seriously. It's not a threat, it's an inevitability.
So any retreat right now is just temporary. The crossover will come when the cost of a robot + AI brain costs less per year than a human salary. Humans will lose that matchup 10 times out of 10. I expect a future where fast food restaurants are all robots with maybe one tech on hand for support. But why would you hire a human that gets sick and only works a quarter of the available hours in a week? Robots don't eat, sleep, or pee. They will be on the job around the clock. We are fucked. We just don't realize it yet.
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u/dalledeverre 1d ago
There won't be fast food restaurants because there won't be any people with any money to buy cheap mass-produced goods, once they've all lost their jobs to robots. When the robots are good enough to not only provide daily personal service to the wealthiest, but to repair and maintain each other, every other human being becomes a novelty at best and vermin at worse. Including the techs.
But, once there aren't any techs left who understand how any of this shit works, there also won't be anyone left to do anything about it developing to the point that the robots are the ones viewing the remaining humans as either novelties or vermin.
Either way, nobody seems to be programming these things to do anything about climate change so chances are jobs will be the very least of our problems after awhile.
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u/loki2002 1d ago
I expect a future where fast food restaurants are all robots with maybe one tech on hand for support. But why would you hire a human that gets sick and only works a quarter of the available hours in a week? Robots don't eat, sleep, or pee. They will be on the job around the clock.
They have been making this same exact threat for over 40 years in regards to fast food.
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u/Forshea 1d ago
I love reading comments from people confidently asserting future progress in technologies that they don't remotely understand
there's a very real possibility that the long-term-sustainable version of these agentic models have a capability that sits somewhere between the distilled open weight models like qwen and frontier models available today e.g. less than what claude opus can do right now
moore's law has been dead for more than a decade and people seem to think we're guaranteed to keep getting geometrical hardware efficiency gains because they thought it was a fundamental truth and not a loose observation
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u/SierraStar7 1d ago
I don’t know who they were who did it, but after my employer has been pushing us to use AI for everything, they got hit with being over budget $200,000 due to token use in one month.
Thank you whoever you are, because now the company has halted using AI unless it’s Copilot or a free version of another product.