If the decision makers were greedy, they wouldn't gamble away the future of the company (or even national economy) because with some very, very low probability the investment will make them insanely rich. Greedy people rather
- want to get even much richer with a high probability, and
- hate it when an investment that they do is with an insanely high probability a dog.
In other words, as I already outlined: such greedy investors would for sure invest some small amount of their investment volume into some insanely high-risk-high-reward opportunities such as AI, so that in the rare event that if this turns out to be huge, they will nevertheless profit insanely from it, but they would never bet most of their money on this single investment area.
> “We have a line of sight to drive approximately $1 billion of gross run rate savings over three years across product development, customer service and support, and many of our operational processes […] through artificial intelligence adoption and enablement.”
HP posted the above today, announcing the layoffs of several thousand workers on the basis that AI may deliver on its promises in the next three years. Whether your argument is valid or not, hundreds of companies now have gambled their future earnings growth on the same AI-hopeful theory of layoffs that HP has so plainly stated. If it ends up being a “significant” investment or not will be determined by future events, so I won’t try to argue either way in that regard. We’ll both find out soon enough!
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HP posted the above today, announcing the layoffs of several thousand workers on the basis that AI may deliver on its promises in the next three years.
My feeling is that this story has barely anything to do with AI. AI was rather a "socially acceptable" welcome excuse for firing lots of people (which may be necessary or be a bad idea; we'll see).
They’re rational actors, though, right? So one can assume that they wouldn’t put a billion dollars of revenue at risk if they didn’t have a plan for replacing the efforts of those workers — and since they’re a publicly traded company, and this is a material forward-looking statement, there would be SEC penalties if they don’t truly mean what they said about AI replacing the workers. Any rational company would take care not to knowingly lie here without having done enough due diligence to have plausible affirmability of what they claim.
(If they’re behaving irrationally, then of course all interpretations are void, but that would invalidate the rationality basis of the comment thread I’m responding to, so I’m not considering that branch of possibilities in this specific thread.)
You seem to be mistaking greedy decision makers for highly reasonable decision makers, and assuming they are not convinced that this particular hype wave is their last best hope for big line going up forever.
> this particular hype wave is their last best hope for big line going up forever.
No hype wave has ever gone up forever in history, so I think it is legitimate to call such a crazy kind of model assumption for the investment "stupidity".
You know what I meant. And perhaps you’d like to refer to what some of these people seem to think about AI — things like the idea that it’s going to so radically take over and disrupt society that there won’t be any work left for humans. That roughly approximates Big Line Up Forever for whoever’s building and running the machines.
It IS stupid. But it’s very real in both Silicon Valley and corporate America boomer capitalism.
If the decision makers were greedy, they wouldn't gamble away the future of the company (or even national economy) because with some very, very low probability the investment will make them insanely rich. Greedy people rather
- want to get even much richer with a high probability, and
- hate it when an investment that they do is with an insanely high probability a dog.
In other words, as I already outlined: such greedy investors would for sure invest some small amount of their investment volume into some insanely high-risk-high-reward opportunities such as AI, so that in the rare event that if this turns out to be huge, they will nevertheless profit insanely from it, but they would never bet most of their money on this single investment area.