The economy is down, and the fad is blame AI so that is what everyone is doing. The last downturn there was a different fad that people blamed it on - but the real root cause was always the economy and not the fad.

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teamonkey 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s understandable that people blame AI for economic issues when so may CEOs are publicly stating that “increased efficiencies due to AI” is the reason for laying off staff.

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bluGill 5 hours ago | parent [-]

They blamed the latest fad for layoffs in the last one as well.

Every company and project I know of has a long list of things they want to do that they believe would be good for customers - but they cannot afford the people needed, and the risk is too high to borrow. That is if AI was really increasing efficiency in a good economy they would be keeping everyone and getting more work done with them.

Of course in reality we cannot know if AI has really increased efficiency - we only have short term measures at best which we know from experience are often wrong. (most often because there are many ways you can make a shortcut today that will kill your long term)

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darth_aardvark 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> " latest fad for layoffs"

What are you referring to here? The latest fad before AI was crypto, or maybe "the metaverse" and I don't think anyone credited those for layoffs. Before that, the latest large round of layoffs was during what, 2008? And the blame for that was correctly laid on the very real economic collapse occurring.

	▲	bluGill 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There have been other downturns that didn't hit tech. Not all fads coincide with a downturn and so not all get blamed on for the layoffs. Sometimes the economy is blamed correctly at well.

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4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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