> If LLMs aren't capable of replacing workers and it's all lies, then what company is going to engage in mass layoffs without seeing results first?
We see companies layoff workers for all sorts of short-sighted reasons. They'll mass layoff to reduce labor costs for short term profits and stock price increases, so the execs and shareholders can cash out. AI is just the current reason the executive class has decided to use for the layoffs they were going to do regardless.
Further: business and management are exceptionally fad-driven, for numerous information-theoretic reasons.
Performance is difficult to measure and slow to materialise. At the same time, everyone, especially senior leadership and managers, is desperately competitive, even where that competition is on the perception rather than reality of performance. There's a very strong follow-the-herd / follow-the-leader(s) mentality, often itself driven by core investors and creditors.
A consequence is a tremendous amount of cargo-culting, in the sense of aping the manifest symbols of successful (or at least investor-favoured) firms and organisations, even where those policies and strategies end up incurring long-term harms.
Then there's the apparent winner-take-all aspect of AI, which if true would result in tremendous economic power, if not necessarily financial gains, to a very small number of incumbents. Look at the earlier fallout of the railroad, oil, automobile, and electronics industries for similar cases.
(I've found over the years various lists of companies which were either acquired or went belly-up in earlier booms, they're instructive.)
NB: you'll find fad-prone fields anywhere a similar information-theoretic environment exists: fashion, arts, academics, government, fine food, wine collecting, off the top of my head. Oh, and for some reason: software development.
We see companies layoff workers for all sorts of short-sighted reasons. They'll mass layoff to reduce labor costs for short term profits and stock price increases, so the execs and shareholders can cash out. AI is just the current reason the executive class has decided to use for the layoffs they were going to do regardless.