While the exact impact of AI on the job market remains hazy at best, ongoing fears that an AI-triggered job apocalypse is nigh are coming to a boiling point.
Last week, Twitter cofounder and Block (formerly Square) CEO Jack Dorsey announced that he was firing 4,000 employees at his fintech company, informing investors that “intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.”
“A significantly smaller team, using the tools we’re building, can do more and do it better,” he added, asserting that the “majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.”
Dorsey’s missives sent shivers down the spines of already on-edge investors. That’s despite critics continuing to question claims like Dorsey’s, arguing that AI simply isn’t capable of fulfilling human jobs and that AI is simply being used as an excuse to enact brutal layoffs.
Regardless of Dorsey’s real intentions, his latest decision to sack half of his company hit workers hard. That’s despite early warning signs, as one former Block machine learning engineer told Business Insider, that their tasks were slowly but surely being made redundant by the tech.
“At some point you look around and say, ‘Gosh, I’m not doing that much of the work anymore, am I?’” the worker, identified only as Kenji, said.
“It certainly dawned on me that I could be in line for redundancy,” he added. “I just didn’t think I was quite there yet.”
Nonetheless, Kenji wasn’t shocked by being let go. For one, he’d been tasked with building systems to detect fraud at the company automatically, slowly waning the need for human intervention over time.
“There was the first 30 seconds of holy sh*t,” he told BI. “But then, as I read the whole thing, I was like, ‘Yeah, I get it.’”
Kenji’s experience is symptomatic of a broader trend playing out in the tech industry. Tech giants have carried out rounds and rounds of mass layoffs while simultaneously pouring untold sums of money into AI, clearly signaling their priorities.
Just earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that Oracle was planning to cut thousands of jobs as it navigated a cash crunch triggered by its efforts to build out AI data centers.
It’s a depressing reality, particularly for those at Block, who were explicitly instructed by Dorsey to make use of AI — or else. In some ways, workers were essentially encouraged to dig their own graves, Kenji argued.
“Over the last year that we were strongly encouraged to use all these AI tools, we were laying the foundations for our own replacement,” he told BI. “If you show the tool how to do a task once or twice, it can kind of take it from there.”
Yet, plenty of pressing questions remain over the viability of AI and whether the tech can indeed fulfil the tasks that CEOs are hoping to automate. Some continue to argue that tech companies are simply addressing overhiring during the pandemic and making it seem like AI is actively replacing jobs.
Dorsey’s claims that AI had driven him to lay off almost half of his staff drew plenty of skepticism among former employees.
In an essay published by the New York Times, former Square head of communications Aaron Zamost argued that “not even Block itself” knows whether AI is replacing work or whether the company’s announcement is “just a convenient and flashy new cover for typical corporate downsizing.”
Former Block employee Jason Karsh also argued that “this isn’t an AI story” in an early March tweet, accusing Dorsey of masking “organizational bloat” with a narrative about AI.
Where the persistent layoffs in the tech industry will lead in the long run remains anything but clear. Besides ongoing fears over AI automation, the US economy is actively losing thousands of jobs per month, according to the latest figures by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in an ongoing downturn that rattled markets this week.
While how much AI is contributing to this trend will continue to be hotly debated, it won’t get any easier for those who helped lay the foundations for their own replacements.
“If I land a job tomorrow, I have zero confidence that it, too, couldn’t be automated away in a couple years,” Kenji told BI.
More on Block: Jack Dorsey Isn’t Telling the Real Story About Block’s AI Layoffs, Insider Says
The post A Machine Learning Engineer Thought He Was Safe From AI Layoffs. Then He Got Some Depressing News appeared first on Futurism.
