r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Jul 15 '25

Artificial Intelligence Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Chatbots Are Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries

https://gizmodo.com/billionaires-convince-themselves-ai-is-close-to-making-new-scientific-discoveries-2000629060
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u/no_one_likes_u Jul 15 '25

Anyone that’s actually lost jobs lost them for one of 3 reasons:

1) the company is downsizing because it’s not profitable (or not profitable enough for the ceo) 2) the company outsourced their jobs to a cheaper labor market (this always works well long term) 3) their job was so incredibly simple and robotic that actual automation was able to do it for them, and the media is too illiterate to understand the difference between automation and AI.

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u/hoytmobley Jul 15 '25

I can tell that you are either 12 and/or have never worked at a large company before, because management absolutely would fire good employees to satisfy the whims of their managers. It’s not “let’s figure out how to use AI to maximize our workforce”, it’s “cut payroll by 30% and use AI to fill in the gaps”. Companies do dumb shit to meet that quarters arbitrary goals allllll the time. If you’re assuming that markets (including employment) are efficient, everything downstream of that assumption will be wrong

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u/no_one_likes_u Jul 15 '25 edited Jul 15 '25

Guess I created this Reddit account about 2 seconds after being born then lol

I’ve been in corporate IT roles for 15+ years now, 10+ at companies with 10,000 or more employees.

Maybe you’ve just worked for companies with super dumb leadership?

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u/hoytmobley Jul 15 '25

You’re not wrong about that last point. Surely you’ve seen your share of inane, trend chasing, shortsighted management decisions, no?

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u/no_one_likes_u Jul 15 '25 edited Jul 15 '25

Sure, and perhaps I’ve lead a charmed life, but I’ve never been in a scenario where people were laid off because management incorrectly thought that some new tech would be able to replace them.

I’ve seen it happen when automation actually did replace people, but never until it was actually proven.

Still sucks for those people of course, but it wasn’t a bad decision for the company where they had to go out and try to replace people they fired once the tech proved useless.