onfocus

This sort of journalism doesn't really care about real consumers, labor, technology, or even whether the technology even works. Its focus is propping up extraction class narratives surrounding unchecked wealth accumulation. It's lazy fanfiction for MBAs who want to pretend to be informed without the pesky weight of ethical or even logistical realities.

But the scam is so lucrative!

The true risk of AI to your job isn't: "an AI will do your job." It's: "an AI salesman will exploit your boss's infinite horniness for replacing mouthy workers with pliable machines to sell him a chatbot that can't do your job, and then your boss will fire you and replace you with that inept, defective chatbot."

CEO brain in a nutshell.

Computers don’t have opinions.

No, Siri isn’t lying here. Apple is lying. Just like all other unethical corporations in the Big AI space, Apple has created a sycophantic chatbot which glazes users, providing an utterly false impression that there’s any value whatsoever to the assessment the chatbot has made. There is none. It is a valueless exchange.

I thought Apple was making good decisions to keep AI features out of its core ecosystem but they’re hopping on the slop train to garbage town.

Tridgell has the right to run the rsync project his way, and nobody can tell him not to. But also, other people do have the right to say: this broke our stuff, it’ll keep breaking our stuff ’cos it’s vibe slop now, and so we’re moving, and everything about all this sucks.

Not rsync! Some things you just expect to work. Someone check on the curl guy!

"Starting today, Automated Counting will be retired," read an internal company newsletter dated Monday that Reuters reviewed and verified ​with two employees. "Beverage components and milk will now be counted the same way you count other inventory categories in your coffeehouse."

Feels good when AI gets fired. I guess Starbucks is realigning resources to focus on human talent.

DuckDuckGo said U.S. app installs went up 18.1% week-over-week on average during the May 20 to May 25 period, compared to May 13 to May 18. The company said that growth was sustained for six consecutive days and peaked at 30.5% on May 25. On iOS, the rate of install is even higher, with week-over-week growth hitting a 33% average, peaking at 69.9%.

Loudly proclaiming you’re not pushing AI is becoming a selling point. Can’t imagine that’s good for raising venture capital money though.

The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City," the report reads. The term "anti-tech violent extremism" does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI domestic extremism reports or guides and represents a novel grouping of a wide range of ideologies under a single extremist category.

Not liking AI is very suspicious!

The reports may throw cold water on the bets tech’s biggest firms have placed on the technology. While some cling to the promise of an AI “renaissance” or “revolution,” the cost of adoption is proving a stubborn bottleneck. These developments also suggest that the economics of replacing or augmenting human labor with AI may be more complicated than some early forecasts originally implied.

oops, trading human employees to pay for compute time may have been a bad trade.

The layoffs come during a bad year for the tech workforce. The tech industry has already cut more than 100,000 jobs this year, per Statista, and is on track to outpace both 2024 and 2025 if the layoff trend continues.

Companies such as Amazon, Block, Cisco, Cloudflare, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle have let go of thousands of employees each, all of them citing a need to refocus expenditures around AI projects as a reason to cut jobs and restructure their organizations.

And they wonder why people hate AI.

Marion also said that the Township’s lawyers gave them a rough estimate of what losing the lawsuit would have cost and it was grim. “It was gonna be about $29,000 per household per resident, approximately, in additional taxes,” Marion said. The board said that the tax burden would have fallen on each township resident every year for the next decade if they had fought and lost.

Billionaires get what they want in America. Communities just have to deal with it.

Predictably, the huge spike in productivity that these companies claim their own AI products have enabled hasn’t resulted in more or better products, shorter work weeks, or better consumer experiences. Mostly, AI implementation in tech companies has been used to justify multiple massive rounds of layoffs.

Seems like it’s primarily a tool to devalue (and deskill?) labor. Why aren’t we seeing improvements in the software we use everyday?

Gartner projects that 50% of companies that attributed headcount cuts to AI will rehire for similar functions by 2027. Forrester found that over half of companies that cut staff for AI already regret the move. A Careerminds survey went further. One in three employers spent more on restaffing than they saved from the original layoffs. That is not efficiency. That is a wire transfer with extra steps.

CEOs need to log off their group texts. I think layoffs are more of a social contagion than a sound business strategy. The more room for error a company has, the more likely they are to indulge terrible ideas.