Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

Corporations that over-hired over the past 10 years needed an excuse to cut the layers of fat and bureaucracy out, and AI came along at just the right time. It doesn’t matter if AI is increasing productivity; what matters is that people think it might be.

Maybe…

I dunno. Anyone who’s been at a big company (the kind that are inclined to over-hire) can attest to the massive population of folks who don’t seem to have any productive job. Does AI spell doom for those people? I have no idea, their job wasn’t to be productive in the first place. Being a warm body to expand the size of some middle managers fiefdom—that is not a job that can be taken by AI, right?

I guess maybe just engineering jobs are on the chopping block. Doomed, by the nature of their productivity actually being tangible, to be replaced by an AI that does their job worse.

Maybe in '23 & '24 that argument made sense. But presumably the past two years they've spent laying everyone off has been enough to trim the fat.

Honestly, any company that's still laying off people that they "overhired" during the pandemic needs to take a hard look at their leadership teams, because they've had ample opportunity to be rid of such people.

The problem is that overhired personal created lots of extra process/org/code/infra complexity, so just by firing X% of people may produce significant damage because rest won't be able to handle that extra complexity or have enough institutional knowledge.

> Being a warm body to expand the size of some middle managers fiefdom—that is not a job that can be taken by AI, right?

If you over-hired and now need to layoff people, because founding and cheap loans aren't available, then AI provides a convenient excuse. You don't have to admit that you paid people to do nothing/very little for the last ten year.

Mergers and acquisitions have been off the charts during this time. No one over hired. They over acquired.

This is just fluff for distracting from outsourcing

I don't think it's that complicated to begin with. Free money, focus on growth. Not free money and looking recession, cut cut cut. AI is a convinent buzzword to keep shareholders happy, no matter how much you actually invest in it.

I don't think it was a grand conspiracy. Executives are just panicking and don't have much more of a clue than the workers. It's just too bad they could weather the storm regardless while people relying on paychecks suffer consequences.