Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

There are many jobs that can be done with AI. Tons of finance, operations, accounts receivable and payable, payroll, etc. All a system needs is input. Dept A had $X-X budget last year, company directive is 5% budget reduction, Dept A gets $X-X - 5% and this is how it will be achieved. AP is completely automated: invoices sent here, voucher created, payment sent to vendor. No need for a team at all. Just 1 AP person to manage the small number of problems. Payroll too simple not to replace. Enter salary, divide by number of pay periods, and the direct deposits get pumped out.

This is not just these jobs. Construction is going this route as well. 3D printed homes. Just keep the cement mix filled and it prints the home. Much better than a room be 3" off at every corner.

So fundamentally Ai , allows you to use data to drive innovation , ideation , drive productivity , assess risk , complete tasks
Etc etc

We have spent years improving business process with rules and automation.
We have tools and devices and systems to make things easier to use and understand.
This latest trend allows us to rapidly evolve how we think about value, people,
Tools , Data and processes.

This notion that Ai will replace jobs , is slightly over blown. Before the calculator or computer or the internet, Digital camera, OCR, think about how people performed tasks and jobs.

Think about how multi modal Ai enables people to interact with the systems and people. It offers barrier removal and accelerated learning. It offers the chance to interrogate on a topics , it fosters curiosity.

Clearly there are risk and biases to consider and mitigate but the potential and upsides are immeasurable.

It’s about democratising, and augmenting existing processes , whilst at the same time accelerating innovation. It’s about collapsing silos of functions and elevating value of peoples existing perceived value and potential.

If you consider, Hw and software defined abstraction and levels of potential automation. You would pay that individual for the Knowledge and skills they possess and how the apply it.
However with Ai their capacity to deliver more value and increase agility is elevated. These so called SMEs in a business or technological domain are key to embracing how we evolve. Does understanding how to use a computer make you more valuable?

It’s just about learning and embracing a new way of working.

For example can create script , you can code in abstracted language- all of this is translated to executable machine level commands.

However If you consider what Gen Ai / co pilot is offering , it is accelerated learning and the abilities to create code from natural language. That may mean you spend less time creating code from scratch , more time optimising, and innovating,
Or creating tests that validate and assess quality. Or better at translating requirements to code . More opportunity to model and simulate.
Does that mean jobs go away , no it just means jobs change , tasks change and value increases.

Coders will be impacted the most by AI. Google is using AI bots to do 25% of its coding. As AI becomes good at coding, soon there wont be a need for a plethora of programmers.

OP is imagining a usefulness of AI that will not exist in the private sector.

Obviously anything coming from the IMF isn't credible. Pro-UBI lunatics will always find ways to justify UBI, creating a class of people permanently addicted to government.

I think the potential distribution that AI allegedly has on jobs would ki-l the consumer market and the advertising industry, ergo social media platforms reliant on those two! If AI does ki-l jobs then a global social living wage would need to be introduced (socialism) but that wont be enough to cover discretionary spend that the consumer market relies on! Welcome to all those SyFy distopian movies, then again Elon Musks robots will have ki-led us all anyway..

Cisco has a number of projects in SBG that just limp along in maintenance mode

People working on these teams make minimal contributions that keep the lights on and not much else

We like to think "management iz stooopid" but they are actually well aware of the nature of work being done on these projects

You can probably countdown until AI-based automatic refactoring/testing is introduced

USA economy is 70% service and consumer consumption. Could this be the cause of next major recession?

When half the country can no longer make enough money selling food and drink to others to pay for their own food and drink? Think more "never ending depression."

It sounds like you are talking about those covered in David Graeber's book "Bu11sh1t Jobs: A Theory." I'm pretty confident this site would eat the URL to the Wikipedia article but if you look at the five classes of useless jobs then look around most big companies you'll see some of each. At Cisco management forced me to be in class 3 to keep my job:

3. Duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, ...

I did get to do some new code in critical paths and going back years later to find no changes shows that the code had sufficient functionality, performance and quality right out of the gate, but as every manager I ever reported to there said, "there's no metric for working code."

It's still cheaper to rent people in third world countries to act as remote order takers for fast food than to do it entirely with computers, and seeing as the people who make the drive through screens for McDonald's couldn't find a way to make the order appear on the screen to which the driver is speaking, the growth of AI will be limited by the monkeys that are trying to make it.

Doom and gloom is the onslaught train wreck coming to USA labor markets. USA economy is 70% service and consumer consumption. Could this be the cause of next major recession?