alt Hacker NewsYours is not just cynical but also wrong and naive. Here's a simpler one: all evidence points to AI bringing at least 10-20% more productivity. This means some companies will lay off. You don't need sophisticated cynicism when a simpler explanation is available.
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Does that productivity increase translate into monetary gains for the company that are greater than the token+compute+other new inteoduced expenses? For smaller companies I can believe it, but massive orgs like Cisco I’m really not so sure. You can be extremely productive and not actually contribute to the company cash flow
ALL evidence?
I have seen data going both ways.
But if you are the company delivering those productivity gains, why would you layoff and thus lose an opportunity to grow?
Can you link to any actual evidence about this 10-20% productivity increase? And I don't mean anecdata like "I'm totally like 8200% more productive!1" that the AI bros love to spew.
From what I'm seeing at the Co I work for with ~1300 devs, productivity is more or less the same as it has always been. Projects aren't being done noticeably faster, there's no less bugs than before (if anything things are more unstable), the backlog remains endless. And we do all the crap that the AI hype tells us to do, we've got harnesses, complex agentic setups etc.
All the recent academic studies disagree with you.