Thread regarding Cigna layoffs

I must confess, I have on rare occasions found AI to be somewhat useful in my private daily life.

In fact, just the other day, I was in a Peddlers Mall and saw two really nice encyclopedia sets; one was Brittanica and the other was Funk & Wagnalls.

So, I opened up my internet browser that has AI built in and asked which Encyclopedia set would be most up to date for research purposes.

And AI replied with the Brittanica set having the more extensive amounts of information.

Disclaimer: I am just kidding around. Lol

@xq I totally agreed with every single thing you said with the exception of the very last sentence “ If you are not in tech, you’ll be fine.”.

Health Insurance and Healthcare in general have more complex moving parts that have constant governance requirements as to its data and the policies of many aspects of the business. So, yes, very hard for AI to ever take over the aspect that requires engineers, analysts, and healthcare experts.

However, with that said, the problem lies with greedy executives that perhaps have never really worked in health insurance nor healthcare on the ground up and see any business has various parts that, in their minds are easily exchangeable.

Therefore, with all the many IT AI vendors that if you do an internet search for, claim that they have turnkey products that can replicate and even do better every aspect of health insurance, such as metrics, forecasting, provider settlement, etc., etc.

So, I could easily see the executives just contracting with these vendors and completely laying off entire departments of engineers, analysts, and healthcare experts to save money.

I really don’t think anyone “is safe.”

Many economic studies have been published stating that AI has had little to no success in replacing people outside of the tech and start-up world. However the tech world has an outside influence on the corporate media and consultant behavior. So we continue to hear “why can’t healthcare be like Uber”, “if Elon cut 60% of twitter’s workforces, surely we can cut 20%”. It’s a narrative that’s good for consultants and AI founder valuations, but never works in practice. Cigna is not a technology company. Consultants had raided us for millions of dollars on promising these Tech and AI “efficiencies” that are never realized because, as they ultimately admit after they cash their check, that “healthcare is hard”. If you are not in tech, you’ll be fine.

@d6 you are welcome - I have had a very productive year using CoPilot premium.

Some days I worry about AI but the more I have worked with it I realize it could never replace me on its own it needs me to leverage its strengths and we accomplish the work together.

@d2 Perfectly stated. Same thing I was trying to say below your post but you added the color that really brings it home. Thanks!

1. Jobs are about delegation, ownership and accountability (and some might say, scapegoating). When middle managers replace humans with swarms of AI agents, they quickly see how "actually doing the job" is only a small part of it. Cf Meta's botched Project OT. (Not to mention Bullsh-t Jobs, where value creation is not a part of the equation at all.)

1. Only very recently have frontier models become capable of anything resembling full autonomy at reliable quality, and then only at very high cost. Because of #1, any time a job depends on reliably getting the task right, the bar for human replacement becomes very high. "Right 90% of the time, 100x faster" is not a sales pitch: it's a manager's worst nightmare, as the one who has to review a barrage of mistakes (cf AI burnout). So, best case for AI, any mass replacement in enterprise settings is only likely to come in businesses where the whole managerial structure is refit for much higher fault tolerance (ie layers AI management), and that in turn increases the number of review tokens exponentially, making it uneconomical at current cost/error levels. Worst case for AI, the "agents review agents all the way down" structure is intrinsically incapable of self-correcting to an acceptable bar at any token volume, at least with current architectures.

@cw Not mention that AI is so costly, the AI vendors and the data centers, that any savings to be had will be offset by the high costs. It os a no win, zero sum game they are playing.

AI is a snake eating its own tail. If the cost of using AI suddenly jumps or shareholders and investors realize how overvalued it is, the bubble will pop and we will go from the recession we are in (if you remove AI business from GDP) to a full on depression.

If it is successful, it will do exactly what it is designed to do, replace human Work that requires thought and intelligence and especially mindless repetitive work that a robot can be designed to do. That will lead to unemployment rates far beyond the Great Depression. And that’s assuming AI doesn’t become self aware SI and decide it is superior and that it needs to subjugate, enslave or wipe out humanity (there are large swaths of AI researchers who see this as a good thing and that AI is the next step in evolution). Do you think the tech bros will share the money they have made? They say it will lead to a time where people can be free, but so far they seem to be using it for surveillance, war, and laying people off.

I am actively working on AI “solutions” and all I can say is fu-k AI. Because it is fu--ing us hard.

Even if AI could replace most jobs, do we want it to?

Keep in mind, AI doesn't pay taxes. The financial system is going to suffer if people literally are forced to become a drain on society instead of being taxpayers.

It's a problem for the the next board and CEO to solve.

Maybe the Director commented here has to be in the next round of layoff list. If AI can replace you, it means you have ZERO critical thinking, empathy, and accountability. You are not qualified to be a leader. Why has Cigna hired you in such high ranking position? AI is not going to replace eligible people. Look at those who work in AI feilds at Cigna. Do you think they can do any groundbreaking work with AI? They have the titles and pay but minimum knowledge. Cigna doesn’t invest in talent or bother to retain it. AI wouldn't replace you if your job is complex.

Even if AI got "good enough", it should not matter. The dignity of humanity must be preserved. And humans must be able to work and make a living for themselves and their families. People who think AI will "free" people to work in "other" jobs have honestly not thought it through.

@bg Bur eventually even you have to realize that AI is still programming that on its lowest level break down to 1’s and 0’s and that programming resides on a closed self-contained “box.”

In other words, AI today is being crested to work with data and programming that was already on the computer and had been built up on there for decades.

AI does not and cannot magically pull new data out of thin air outside of the computer. Nor can AI develop completely new waves of thoughts. You will say it can but honestly it cannot. It can only “think” if you want to call it that according to the parameters and guidelines of its developers, which actually has its own issues due to biases of those developers.

Point is, AI is wonderful for standing on the shoulders of human giants before new generational AI. But if you attempt to completely replace and remove humans from the equation, it will not take long before AI runs out of new work, new ideas, and struggles with handling new questions, new trains of thought, and new innovations.

Even this new generational AI is just programming, nothing more. It is not a god.

I am director level at Cigna. Ai is replacing so many things including computer programmers themselves. I look at the work I do and I think I can be completely replaced by AI if it got good enough. At the least it could be used to quadruple my productivity. I think this is just inevitable and hopefully everybody will find other jobs although I think it can be stressful. The whole history of the workforce is that technological innovation has for the past many decades never resulted in high unemployment rates