Ford CEO Predicts AI Could Eliminate Half of US White-Collar Jobs (msn.com)
- Reference: 0178269792
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/07/03/1255209/ford-ceo-predicts-ai-could-eliminate-half-of-us-white-collar-jobs
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/ceos-start-saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud-ai-will-wipe-out-jobs/ar-AA1HRs3l
> The Ford CEO's comments are among the most pointed to date from a large-company U.S. executive outside of Silicon Valley. His remarks reflect an emerging shift in how many executives explain the potential human cost from the technology. Until now, few corporate leaders have wanted to publicly acknowledge the extent to which white-collar jobs could vanish.
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> In interviews, CEOs often hedge when asked about job losses, noting that innovation historically creates a range of new roles.
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> In private, though, CEOs have spent months whispering about how their businesses could likely be run with a fraction of the current staff. Technologies including automation software, AI and robots are being rolled out to make operations as lean and efficient as possible.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/artificial-intelligence/ceos-start-saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud-ai-will-wipe-out-jobs/ar-AA1HRs3l
should be 'CEO doesn't understand tech, is scared' (Score:2)
i seriously doubt its going to 'eliminate' them - its going to 'change' them at most
Re: should be 'CEO doesn't understand tech, is sca (Score:2)
Yes it's going to change them so that one person can do the work of two.
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This is the productivity paradox. IT was supposed to usher in this great new world of productivity and it never manifested. This promise of the great new world where productivity soars is a sales pitch that only works on C level execs who need to justify their existence to the company before they parachute out. AI when it reaches AGI might do some useful things., for now it is a LLM that predicts the next word in a way we naively believe is thought.
Re: should be 'CEO doesn't understand tech, is sc (Score:2)
There is no way for it to happen unless the wealthy unanimously agree that the less wealthy get more based on something other than hours worked. Hard to see how that can possibly happen without a bloody revolt.
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Productivity did soar, by rather quite a bit. But companies did not use that increase in productivity to offer the same stuff with fewer employees, they used it to offer ever more complex products and services, while keeping them affordable.
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It is not a paradox. Productivity has increased at least since 1945 and it even accelerated around 1995. But benefits are not distributed evenly.
[1]https://i.sstatic.net/iCTuo.jp... [sstatic.net]
This productivity increase, or automation, has also caused a steady job loss (when measured as total hours or work), at least for the past 15 years. I am pretty sure that this means that even if new jobs are created, it won't be enough to cover lost jobs, unless we switch back to "man works, woman stays home" society.
You are also mi
[1] https://i.sstatic.net/iCTuo.jpg
Those who don't foul up history... (Score:2)
> Yes it's going to change them so that one person can do the work of two.
Or one person makes the mistakes of two. Don't forget the offshoring craze that generated piles of maintenance problems such that at least some staff was often re-onshored. Being embedded in the domain matters.
All the CEO's were gung-ho about offshoring back then also, but ended up with more ho than gung.
Re: Those who don't foul up history... (Score:2)
Uh, that never went away. Companies just got better at being able to work around the issues that the offshoring caused. And the very same thing will happen with AI.
Re: (Score:3)
To date the only AI that I've seen deliver any sort of semi-useful work in the corporate world has been meeting summarization technology. Basically the AI attempts to interpret what was said in the meeting in order to deliver a summary.
I call it semi-useful because it doesn't understand nuance, varying slang terms versus official terms for industry-speak, and it can't even handle wisecracking.
I suppose that in a forensic-ish role it could help because it could analyze large datasets to find patterns, datas
CEOs are salespeople (Score:5, Insightful)
Their job is to sell to investors that their company is doing just fine. They see layoffs coming, and would desperately like to blame AI, instead of blaming just about anything else.
Reality usually turns out to be not as bad as the doomsayers predict, and not as good as the cheerleaders predict. Some jobs will be lost, yes. But half of white collar jobs? That prediction assumes way more confidence in what AI can do, than is warranted in practice.. Despite how quickly AI has burst on the scene, it's still a very raw, immature product. It's going to take time for it to mature and to be able to really replace people's jobs at scale.
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> Their job is to sell to investors that their company is doing just fine. They see layoffs coming, and would desperately like to blame AI, instead of blaming just about anything else.
> Reality usually turns out to be not as bad as the doomsayers predict, and not as good as the cheerleaders predict. Some jobs will be lost, yes. But half of white collar jobs?
Perhaps he was more referring to his "white" collar workers, since the union negotiations essentially turned a blue collar hourly wage into something that every college graduate is now jealous of.
Of course the end result of that blue collar turned white is rolling mortgages rotting away on Ford lots everywhere. Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with that instant depreciation hit that went from 10% to 40% for all post-COVID overpriced dogshit?
Preach on, value-adding CEO. * rolls eyes *
What about the CEOs? (Score:2)
Some say AI could eliminate half of US CIO jobs.
Re: (Score:1)
PhbGPT
Speaking of Ford ... (Score:2)
[1]https://babylonbee.com/news/fo... [babylonbee.com]
[1] https://babylonbee.com/news/ford-debuts-worlds-first-autonomous-car-to-leave-factory-and-drive-straight-to-shop-for-repairs
It will destroy Blue collar jobs too (Score:2)
Because White collar people higher Blue collar people to do work. And if you don't have a job you can't do that.
Never mind the fact that we can't all be plumbers. If we all go be blue collar people again, who the hell is going to hire all those blue color people? I don't know if anyone here ever knew any blue collar folk but they don't hire other blue color folk to do anything except major jobs that require specialized tools and equipment.
Not that any of this matters. We are about to give another 5
Re: (Score:2)
Hire and Higher are homophones but mean different things. You hire someone to do the job and hope they don't move higher up the corporate ladder than you.
--your friendly neighborhood pedant.
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--your friendly neighborhood pedant.
This is just an ad homonym argument.
[stolen from a recent SMBC]
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The far right can only do three things, strawman, ad hominem attack and be racist as fuck.When you stand for nothing but unfettered avarice, its all they got. Low intelligence people do and say low intelligence things.
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> Not that any of this matters. We are about to give another 5 trillion dollars to the 1% and the economy is going to collapse when we do.
No one seems to be talking about how bought and paid for your local repesentative is. Murkowski and Collins are the two biggest jokes in politics. They stand for nothing. They stand with their hands out and that is how they vote. They have this performative theater act they do to make it seem like they support their constitutents, when they do nothing but take bribes.
I disagree with the economy will collapse because of this awful bill. A mixture of trump's tariffs and the fed being his personal fluffer wil
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> I am no longer coming to this site. Every day is a stupid article about "AI is taking all the jobs!". No its not. This site doesnt have any original content. Its just posting the same crap day after day after day about ai. Ive had enough.
Instead of ignoring all of the reports of sizeable layoffs that have plagued tech for the last 12-18 months (ironically for the reason you deny), care to share what job you hold that you assume is magically immune in the alternate reality unfazed by AI?
New jobs? (Score:3)
Back in the seventies and eighties, as automation was hitting hard, and offshoring beginning, the talk was all about how everyone would get newer, better jobs in the "information economy".
They at least could point to something.
Now? They have *nothing* at all, and "we'll have fewer people, but other companies will pick up the slack" ... said by every one of them.
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> Back in the seventies and eighties, as automation was hitting hard, and offshoring beginning, the talk was all about how everyone would get newer, better jobs in the "information economy". They at least could point to something.
> Now? They have *nothing* at all, and "we'll have fewer people, but other companies will pick up the slack" ... said by every one of them.
In the interim, companies and C-suite executives have realized that they no longer have to have any rhetoric at all that reassures workers or the general public. In fact, our media being owned by a very small number of extremely wealthy corporations actually makes it important to most executives to only appeal to the extremely wealthy, the owner class, and the government officials that work directly for that owner class. So for the most part, these folks have stepped into a reality where they no longer have
But but but (Score:2)
"Ford CEO Predicts AI Could Eliminate Half of US White-Collar Jobs"
But not HIS job, amirite?
So Ecoboost was in reality already A.I. .. (Score:2)
.. interesting Ford is at the technological forefront, they will drive the blue as well as the white collars with all the ripped wet belts .. because they ain't drivin a camshaft any more.
They will also reinvent themself, when they stop selling cars ..
Look at motivations (Score:4, Insightful)
When reading statements or listening to interviews, always keep the speaker's motivations in mind. What would the CEO of Ford be trying to accomplish by what they're saying? The typical motivations are to reassure investors. How does saying that half the white collar jobs are going to be gone in the coming years reassure investors? It says, "this new technology is going to allow Ford to cut half of a very large expense."
Is it realistic? No. But it supports his goal: you should invest in Ford because we can already see how to use this new technology to drastically decrease costs.
Another goal he has is to keep workers fearing for their jobs. This is an implied threat to a bunch of Ford workers... you're lucky to have a job, so keep your head down and don't make a fuss. Cuts are coming.
post labor economics (Score:2)
This should be the only thing every economist on the planet is working on. Yet when you search YouTube, only ONE guy is working on it, David Shapiro [1]https://www.youtube.com/result... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=post+labor+economics
Forgive me ... (Score:2)
... if I don't pay too much heed to a CEO of a car company who has zero engineering experience. I get that the execs are creaming themselves with the possibilities of hanging their workforce out to dry, but the shit I see coming out of most corner offices can't even be used for fertilizer.
Never mind AI ... (Score:1)
Yes, they could eliminate half of all white collar jobs because half of them are useless anyway, various managers, specialists and analysts who spend most of their time justifying their own existence and fighting each other for control and budget dollars. AI is just a timely excuse to cut this waste.
Too bad for white collar workers (Score:2)
The world will always need ditch diggers, so dont be afraid to get your hands dirty and callused and grab a shovel
Sigh... probably not wrong. (Score:2)
It'll be a while - probably a long while - before AI can replace those core people who are vital to an org. You know the type... driven, transformative... annoying.... and valuable.
But... most people are not that. Can AI replace "most" people? Probably. That bucket contains roles that are mundane and repetitive, and that's relatively easy, it also contains the seat fillers and half-assers. And there thd AI doesn't even have to be particularly good to be equivalent.
People sometimes miss that the real questio
go ______ yourself (Score:2)
The answer is eliminate.
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Elimination will come by shooting themselves in the foot. A bunch of unemployed people won't be able to buy their cars.
Apple computer (Score:2)
Apple computer is one of the most powerful and wealthy companies on the planet but has a tiny number of users.
They don't care about having a lot of customers anymore. They want a tiny amount of ultra Rich customers paying a huge amount of money.
What we are heading for is techno feudalism. There's going to be a very very very very tiny number of kings and queens running the show, a very very small number of people serving them and then 99.9% of us will be living in unimaginable poverty..
Go look u
Re: (Score:2)
Over half of US smart phone owners own an Apple so their customer base is hardly "tiny", at least in this country.
I also think you're giving modern business leaders too much credit in regards to long term planning. They only care about the next quarter or at best the next year. They could give a rats ass about future wide spread unemployment because they'll be both wealthy and retired by then.