> Thousands are being laid off, supposedly because they're "being replaced with AI," implying the AI is as good or better as humans at these jobs.
I don't think the "implying the AI is as good or better as humans" part is correct. While they may not be saying it loudly, I think most folks making these decisions around AI and staffing are quite clear that AI is not as good as human workers.
They do, however, think that in many cases it is "good enough". Just look at like 90%+ of the physical goods we buy these days. Most of them are almost designed to fall apart after a few years. I think it's almost exactly analogous to the situation with the Luddites (which is often falsely remembered as the Luddites being "anti-technology", when in reality they were just "pro-not-starving-to-death"). In that case, new mechanized looms greatly threatened the livelihood of skilled weavers. The quality of the fabric from these looms tended to be much worse than those of the skilled weavers. But it was still "good enough" for most people such that most consumers preferred the worse but much cheaper cloth.
It's the same thing with AI. It's not that execs think it's "as good as humans", it's that if AI costs X to do something, and the human costs 50X (which is a fair differential I think), execs think people will be willing to put up with a lot shittier quality if the can be delivered something much more cheaply.
One final note - in some cases people clearly do prefer the quality of AI. There was an article on HN recently discussing that folks preferred Waymo taxis, even though they're more expensive.