Even if that's been happening, I don't think it would be politically savvy to admit it.
In today's social climate claiming to replace humans with AI would attract the wrong kind of attention from politicians (during an election year) and from the public in general.
This would be even more unwise to admit for a company like Google who's an "AI producer". They may leave such a language for closed meetings with potential customers during sales pitches though.
Don't think the public will be that concerned about people in Google's salary bracket losing their jobs.
Depends on who you ask.
If Trump wins and Elon Musk actually gets a new job, they would be bragging about replacing humans with AI all day long. And corporates are going to love it.
Not sure about what voters think though. But the fact that most of these companies are in California, New York etc means that it barely matters.
In a similar vein, solving world hunger is closer today than it's ever been. The previous best hope was global thermonuclear war, but honestly that would leave enough survivors as to be mostly ineffective, and much more likely to have the opposite result. Severe climate change has a better shot at fully eliminating [human] hunger.
A new economy is forming and there is nothing that can stop it without causing major, unintended fallout.
Has either bragged about this at all?
The only thing I've heard floated is Musk running a "government efficiency commission" which I just assumed meant he would be looking for ways to gut a lot of the never ending, never dying government programs. I've never heard him saying the commissions goal was to replace people with AI.
https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/2024-election/trump-m...
The former president said such an audit would be to combat waste and fraud and suggested it could save trillions for the economy.
As the first order of business, Trump said that this commission will develop an action plan to eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months.
When I was working in RPA (robotic process automation) about 7 years ago, we were explicitly told not to say "You can reduce your team size by having use develop an automation that handles what they're doing!"
Even back then we were told to talk about how RPA (and by proxy AI) empowers your team to focus on the really important things. Automation just reduces the friction to getting things done. Instead of doing 4 hours of mindless data input or moving folders from one place to the other, automation gives you back those four hours so your team can do something sufficiently more important and focus on the bigger picture stuff.
Some teams loved the idea. Other leaders were skeptical and never adopted it. I spent the majority of those three years trying to selling them on this idea automation was good and very little time actually coding. Its interesting seeing the paradigm shift and seeing this stuff everywhere now.
As a non-politically savy person ;-) I have a feeling that this is a similarly dangerous message, since what prevents many teams to focus on really important things is often far too long meetings with managers and similar "important" stakeholders.
1. Almost every business has growing workload. That means reassigning good employees and not hiring new headcount, not firing existing headcount. Unipurpose, low-value offshore teams are the only ones who get cut (e.g. doing "{this} for every one of {these}" work).
2. Most operational automation is impossible to build well without deep process expertise from the SME currently performing it. If you fire that person immediately after automating their task, what do you think the next SME tells you, when you need their help?
Successfully scaling operational automation programs therefore rely on additional headcount avoidance (aka improving their volume:employee ratio) and value measurement (FTE-equivalent time savings) to justify/measure.
Would it be? Do they care?
Sam Altman's been talking about how GenAI could break capitalism (maybe not the exact quote, but something similar), and these companies have been pushing out GenAI products that could obviously and easily be used to fake photographic or video evidence of things that have occurred in the real world. Elon's obsessed with making an AI that's trained to be a 20-year-old male edgelord from the sewer pits of the internet.
Compared to those things, "we've replaced X% of our workforce with AI" is absolutely anodyne.
Altman encourages anyone that will listen to him that monopolies are the only path to success in business. He has a lot riding on making sure everyone is addicted to AI and that he’s the one selling the shovels.
Google isn’t far off.
Most capitalists have this fantasy that they can reduce their labour expenses with AI and continue stock buy-backs and ever-increasing executive payouts.
What sucks is that they rely on class divisions so that people don’t feel bad when the “overpaid” software developers get replaced. Problem is that software developers are also part of the proletariat and creating these artificial class divisions is breaking up the ability to organize.
It’s not AI replacing jobs, it’s capital holders. AI is just the smoke and mirrors.
