IBM fired 8,000 people in order to replace them with AI.
IBM then hired a whole lot of people because the efficiencies AI brought about meant that they had quite a bit of money that they needed to invest in order to bring about better profits for their shareholders.
The people who were fired were in human resources.
They were doing relatively repetitive jobs, which artificial intelligence could more or less safely do.
The people who were hired were engineers and salespeople.
IBM is more efficient in making money because they were able to let go of people in one area of the business and hire more people in another area, which have each increased IBM's economic productivity.
All of the previous industrial revolutions including those in agriculture have involved massive increases in productivity and fears, in some cases, of jobs going away.
The Luddites, for instance, destroyed the looms that were set to replace them, for fear that they would be replaced and have no future.
However, very few people now work in either agriculture or in creating clothing and material.
People work in different roles and different jobs.
These jobs would not be possible without those past industrial revolutions.
I'm also not all that scared of artificial intelligence replacing us as a workforce, entirely.
Consider the current LLM models, in the very least of it, these models were trained on the entire internet and they tend to average out the views they get to come to a sort of very common sense sort of spirit of the people type of view of various matters, and then they get fine tuned in one direction or the other.
If I had read the entire internet as artificial intelligence, in a sense, has, I'm sure I would have come to very different conclusions about things than those that the artificial intelligence does.
In capitalism, we have many, many different views of things and people try all sorts of ideas, many of which don't seem like they'd work if you put them on paper, but which work tremendously.
For instance, Red Bull is the greatest competitor of Coca Cola.
Likewise, Dyson, with their vacuums, created a product which people might think was way overpriced for something like a vacuum cleaner ...
Yet, it wasn't. In my household, we own a Dyson and many people use that specific brand, which if you'd put it as a business plan and tried to convince people about it, they might not have invested.
As Rory Sutherland, the great marketer says, the opposite of a good idea can often be a good idea.
Human beings are experts in a sort of brilliant illogic, which gets weeded out or pruned to perfection, through the sort of capitalist Darwinism of the free market, which brings, about profits from tons of different ideas, which are often counterintuitive but effective.
AI is logical but can be too logical and it's a sort of benchmarking.
If you all, within your industry, ask AI how you should do things, you will all do things the same way.
The one person who might do a number of those things that way but who also applies their own intuition and their own intelligence ...
They perhaps try to note the parts of the benchmark which they are probably not going to succeed with, that they are probably going to become invisible if they follow, and instead look at the reverse of that, at what the benchmark is bad at, or what the competitor is bad at, and do that ...
That person perhaps will stand out.
AI tends to push people towards the norm and the mean but it also makes them quite invisible in that sense. People who might come to me for legal advice are probably coming to me for my legal advice.
Within the legal context there are always solicitors on both sides of any big case.
I don't believe the solicitor on one side or the other side thinks that the opposite side is deluded or foolish to be there.
It's simply the fact that they know they will generally be more than one perspective on any legal matter.
It's also the case that so much of what we know about the world is not in a book or on a computer. Even if it is in a book or on a computer, it's often something which is unexpected which stands out.
It's a combination between human ingenuity and AI taking over the roles which we as human beings no longer need to do which, I believe, will not only be effective, it will create growth, it will create productivity, it will create jobs and it will create time for people to do the things they ought to be doing rather than things they simply have to do because robots aren't able to do them yet.
