PricewaterhouseCooper annual global CEO survey…
Really? You can’t be serious? This must be a joke right? (include heavy doses of sarcasm in all of these questions). My actual unsurprising response was “no shit sherlock”. Remember, these fools are burning through investment capital and Wall Street is complicit in pumping up the valuation of these companies because these sociopaths are mostly in it for the trade (because the large amount of volume that is moved up and down, is generating profits for those involved in trading those moves). Any regular person listening to the bad advice (from the pumpers) in the financial press are the suckers who will be left looking at red in their accounts (or actual realized losses if they sell at a loss/are forced out of those positions if they are highly leveraged).
But guess what these same clowns (aka CEOs) are saying in CYA mode… “We’re still in the early stages of AI”. Again, I need to reiterate that I am not against AI (machine learning) completely. There are many use cases where I have no issues with it (like in audio, image, and video processing, or as a base assistance tool). The issue I have is the lens which these executives have always looked at technology that allows them to aggressively reduce the head counts as a way to cut costs in order to make their bottomline look that much better (because this is what Wall Street metrics expects of those results).
And it is no surprise that the technology is being weaponized by scammers and con artists while massive amounts of resources are wasted on AI generated slop that gets posted on social media. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the other week pleaded with people to stop using the term slop trying to highlight that he understands there are low quality/low effort stuff resulting from the tech, but to look at the benefits of what the technology can bring to how people work. That is fine and dandy until you look at the garbage the company is pushing out to their products including Windows 11. All he did was ignite even more backlash with people now referring to the company as Microslop. And it is well deserved.
The company again LAID OFF workers after a record quarter last summer, then reported a week later about saving $500 million as a result of AI being used in call centers (but they had previously laid off over 30,000 and some of that in hindsight was similarly due to the use of AI replacing those workers. That was the final catalyst that made me divest from the company ASAP (context, Microsoft was over a $4 trillion market cap at that time). The actions speak louder than the words and I’m at the point where I do not apologize for going all negative on these corporate CEO’s when it comes to how they are force shoving this into every corner of society without care of the damage and consequences that will end up taking place.
