Amazon is sending more thousands to the unemployment market, joining Meta (Facebook parent company) for a second round. I do not believe that the big tech is firing many people because the economy is fading. My thesis is that big tech is firing because productivity tools are advancing at scale. In other words, units which had needed 100 people three years ago can run efficiently with 50 people today. And when that is the case, what happens: you move people out.
From Meta to Google* to Amazon, many companies would be severely redesigned because technologies will assume some roles. If you have an iPhone, a decent laptop, and a company in-house productivity system, at a mid-level management, you may not need a human assistant. Indeed, as companies automate many tasks, big tech will create massive redundancies over the next few years.
Sure, the economy may be cooling. But the rate of firing is well larger than the rate of any cooling in the economy. More so, this transformation goes beyond big tech to other sectors like insurance, banking and entertainment.
I read the annual reports of many Nigerian banks as I check their cost-to-income ratios which provide to me how efficient the banks are run. One of the revelations is this: most have largely multiplied customer base, revenue, etc even when the staff base has not moved, using 2015 benchmarks. Who needs more workers when you can hire ATMs with no benefits except generators?
Simply, we need to be alert because the nature of work is changing as industries transform with automation systems going after our jobs. Continuous learning is the only solution because even the coders and geeks cannot think they’re safe as ChatGPT arrives to join the developer community at scale.
When WordPress came, it cushioned the penetration of personal websites and blogs as it made maintaining websites easier for non-techies. ChatGPT will take that to the next level. Indeed, you type what you want and ChatGPT generates the codes and tells you where to post it! Who needs a developer for a simple static website?
Amazon will cut another 9,000 jobs in the coming weeks, CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to staff on Monday. This is the second round of layoffs this year at the e-commerce behemoth, which announced plans in January to reduce its workforce by 11,000 and later revised the figure up to 18,000. Facebook parent company Meta also announced a fresh round of job cuts last week, saying it will shed 10,000 positions in addition to the 11,000 it eliminated in late 2022. The ongoing reductions suggest many tech companies still consider themselves overstaffed after hiring aggressively during pandemic boom times.
The new cuts will primarily affect employees in Amazon’s cloud computing, human resources and advertising divisions, along with roughly 400 workers at live streaming platform Twitch, according to TechCrunch.(LinkedIn News)
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Comment 1: This is THE philosophical problem of the modern age – since Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century, around 1440-1450, built the first printing press: What will people do now since new technology is eliminating jobs at scale? So far we have been able to adapt and learn to do things with the technology and in different ways, thus creating new jobs never conceived of before.
As technology evolved, iteration after interation, we evolved alongside those advances. But is technological advancement now outpacing human capacity requirements? Is technology widening the gap between societal echelons – between the highly educated AI smiths and the village smallholder subsistence farmer?
Tough questions to answer. There’s no doubt AI will help to create new technologies and help to solve existing problems. New jobs will be needed to solve problems of today and ones we haven’t even thought of yet. We are adaptable and intelligent yet the question still remains though as how much can be done with how few people? That is the question and experience being challenged by AI and business leaders, not how many people we can employ to enjoy fulfilling full lives.
My Response: “New jobs will be needed to solve problems of today and ones we haven’t even thought of yet. ” Indeed. new jobs will be created (more of them actually) even as some are lost. Yet, one has to be ready for those opportunities of the future. Re-training, re-education, etc will help us prepare.
Comment 2: Moore’s law didn’t predict tech evolution to go at this pace. It seems at this current pace, it will be somewhat impossible for man to keep learning with the ambition of being at par or ahead of tech.
I believe at some point there will be regulations and ethics to address the impact of tech on jobs. Humans can’t constantly live with the fear of tech and losing their jobs, Which seems like the current state of things.
Companies should optimize. Companies must optimize. But the end goal of optimization shouldn’t be the complete elimination of the workforce.
Comment 3: “Who needs more workers when you can hire ATMs (technologies) with no ‘benefit’ except generator?”
“Continuous learning is the only solution,” but most organizations, especially in Nigeria, are currently not investing in the knowledge bank of their employees. Rather, they are sapping the little knowledge they have and the time they could have utilized to invest in themselves with overwork and, consequently, burnout.
In places where people are put into consideration ahead of processes, technologies, and output, there are arguments and policy implementation that allow for personnel a 4 four day 9-5 work day/hour work schedule.
However, in Nigeria and maybe some other countries, personnel do not only work 8-6 but Monday – Saturday and sometimes Sundays. When you add the traffic jam, you find out that some of them are working 5am-9pm (or 10 pm) Monday-Friday/Saturdays. This is coupled with the unsustainable take-home that result in poor standard of living.
On this note, I wonder how these kinds of people will be able to pace up with technological advancement!
Comment 3R: All the comments have been excellent like the main write-up. My thought is that we are gradually approaching the age of the machines where the bulk of the work would be done by a fusion of AI and humanoids (many implications here). This would lead to welfarist states where people are not able to get normal jobs and the states will exact higher taxes on the employed people to support others.
This is already happening but expect it on a larger scale, might be the new normal.
Albeit it is also possible that humans will wander off in their mind to invent new things or move to other parts of the universe (Star Trek anyone?) …an unoccupied mind is a very productive one when properly challenge. The future is exciting.
My Response: Indeed, a new normal where folks cannot even find jobs to apply. I think the world needs a new policy on jobs. In the past, they used to tell us that if you are technically advanced, that your jobs will be there. Today, Facebook is firing most advanced VR/AR engineers out there.
