More Big Tech layoffs. Is AI to blame?

Make Me Smart January 18, 2024 Transcript

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Kimberly Adams 

All right, I’m ready to go.

Kai Ryssdal 

Jayk Cherry says, sure, let’s go. Hey everybody, I’m Kai Rysssal. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense.

Kimberly Adams 

And I’m Kimberly Adams. Thank you everyone for joining us on this Thursday, January the 18th.

Kai Ryssdal 

Thursday is the day we play some tape about the big stories of the week, offer some thoughts, comments, suggestions and observations, and then move on about our days. Let’s go to the first one, Jayk.

Mike Johnson 

When I met with President Zelensky, just last month, right before Christmas, he said that the necessary ingredient is the proper weapons systems that they need. There are certain things that are that are needed to ensure that they can prevail. We need the questions answered about the strategy about the endgame, and about the accountability for the precious treasure of the American people. We understand that all these things are important. But we must insist, we must insist that the border be the top priority.

Kimberly Adams 

That was House Speaker Mike Johnson talking to reporters here in D.C., after meeting with President Biden and other congressional leaders at the White House. Biden really has been pushing for more aid to Ukraine, but Republicans are insisting, as you just heard there, that any funding package has to be paired with border policy changes. And this is all going on as Congress is really racing to pass the short term spending bill to avoid a partial government shutdown that would kick in on Friday night. Worth noting that we’ve got more bad weather coming to D.C. in the coming days now. And I say bad weather, but I’m from Missouri. And D.C. version of bad weather is not Missouri version of bad weather or most other places that have weather, bad weather, but somehow this entire city shuts down with like two inches of snow. It’s astonishing to me. But nevertheless, we’ve got some snow coming. And so, they’re really trying to possibly even move on this stuff tonight. But it’s, it’s dicey. Because, you know, basically, in order to get this through, Johnson’s going to have to do what McCarthy did and work with the Democrats. And, you know, it’s also worth noting, Johnson said last year that he was not going to put another continuing resolution up for consideration. And he did it because they ran out of time. And they also they weren’t working through the holidays, trying to get this done. They went away and came back because there was no sense of a deal. So, it’s not looking great. But it’s also strange, because there actually is like, bubbling bipartisan agreement here on the need to do something about the border. But there’s also this sense that there are some in the GOP, who do not want an immigration deal under a Biden administration. Right. And so, you know, they’re playing games with the funding of Homeland Security, saying that it’s a way to sort of punish them for not taking care of the border. But that will also make it harder to take care of the border. It’s, it’s a mess. It’s a mess up here. And not just because of the weather.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, it’s just it’s, it’s, you know, leadership means making hard choices. And those choices have to be made in excruciatingly short periods of time, given how hard those choices are. And it’s, it’s playing out now in real time. And I think, just parenthetically, I think the speaker underestimated how difficult this job was gonna be.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, I mean, he never planned to be speaker.

Kai Ryssdal 

Well, that’s a fair point.

Kimberly Adams 

I mean, there are a lot of negative things you can say about the Speaker of the House. But I mean, he took a job that was in an almost impossible situation, to basically get Congress working again, and the fact that he wasn’t prepared for a job. He had no intent. He did not start his term doing. I don’t know, can’t blamed him for that one. All right, let’s go to the next piece of audio.

Kristalina Georgieva 

60% of jobs in advanced economies, over a foreseeable future are going to be impacted by artificial intelligence.

Kai Ryssdal 

That was the head of the International Monetary Fund. Her name is Kristalina Geogieva. I had her on the show like three years ago, and she had to run me through the pronunciation of her name like four times. Anyway, so she was at a Bloomberg event at the World Economic Forum in Davos talking about some new research from the IMF on how the labor market could be impacted by AI, which as it turns out, is a lot because just today Google has announced and other tech companies are floating rumors of laying people off because their jobs can be done by AI. So this is A real thing that is coming. And those of you, which I mean, full disclosure was me for a long time after this first broke, by which I mean months, because it’s only been like a year. I was like, Oh, come on, whatever. It’s real people. It’s coming. It is coming.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, it’s definitely coming. I mean, we’re already, it’s already here. We’re already seeing massive layoffs. I mean, there have been layoffs, and we’re seeing them in the tech world for sure. And there have been lots of excuses about it. But we’re seeing them in the media industry as well. I think some of the layoffs we’re seeing in media are preemptively getting ready for the hit that AI is going to take in our industry. And yeah, it’s not good. It’s not good for us.

Kai Ryssdal 

But you know, the best we can do is go into it with our eyes open, right, be informed and learn about it and you know, take appropriate steps to protect yourself.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, continue to build skills and get training because I mean, it reminds me of the movie Hidden Figures.

Kai Ryssdal 

Remind, remind people what that was, because not everybody knows.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes so, Hidden Figures was the movie about the Black women, who were, they call them computers for NASA. They were basically these expert mathematicians that ran advanced calculations for NASA, in what was the 60s, I guess. And, you know, these amazing women who were in this an incredibly difficult circumstance in a segregated space, and were treated like garbage, but were doing this amazing work. But there’s an arc of, in the in the movie about some of these women saw these actual computers being installed in NASA, and took it upon themselves to learn how to work these IBM mainframes and learn how to effectively code and operate these computers. And so, then when it came time to move into the system, they were ready for it. And they were able to get those jobs, even when their white counterparts were not because they saw it coming and they got ready. And I think about that a lot as we’re in this moment. It’s like, what is coming? And how can you position yourself and take the initiative to learn what you need to learn to make sure that you’re not left behind in the change that is inevitably coming? Exactly.

Kai Ryssdal 

Exactly. And it was a really good movie. I’m going to go rewatch that . I was just gonna say might might be on the queue there somewhere. All right. One more, here we go.

Brittany Piestch 

Hi. Thanks for meeting with me. And Rosie. We have an important meeting today. We finished our evaluations of 2023 performance. This is where you’ve not met Cloudflare expectations for performance. We’ve decided to part ways with you. Yeah, I’m gonna stop right there.

Kimberly Adams 

Stop them, right there. Yeah. Whoo, boy. So that was a clip that has gone so viral on Tiktok and other short video platforms of a woman named Brittany Piestch, who posted a video of herself getting laid off. And she knew it was coming, because I guess all of her colleagues had been getting these, like 15 10, had these 10 to 15 minute meetings suddenly put on their calendars, and then they were getting laid off. And during this video, she repeatedly asks for examples of how she hadn’t met performance expectations and why her manager wasn’t on the call. And she was like, look, I started here, four months ago, there was three months of onboarding. And then it was the holidays, when nobody was doing any deals like and I’ve had nothing but positive feedback from my managers and all the people that I work with. How can you say that my performance is not up to par? And, you know, obviously, let me not say, obviously, but it from that interaction, assuming that her narrative is accurate. You know, it felt like a lot of corporate jargon just to pave over some layoffs. But it went very far and lots of people related to it. Because we’ve had all the, we were just saying all these layoffs in the tech field firms like Google, Salesforce, Duolingo have announced layoffs. Many companies saying that the layoffs are due to a renewed focus on AI. The Duolingo layoffs got a ton of traction on social media. I was seeing quite a bit of traffic on it on Mastodon. It’s so weird to have all these platforms, where people were saying that they used to be translators for Duolingo and like helping check translations and helping people, you know, edit the software. Basically, they had real humans helping in Duolingo. And now all those people were feeling like, that all of their work was being used to train the AI to replace them. And you know, obviously Duolingo has an alternative narrative to this. But as I said, a few minutes ago, this is real. This is here. And not many of us are immune. And there’s been a lot of research. I think it was the IMF that did some research that found that white collar jobs are obviously going to be hit the hardest. But the more developed economies are going to feel this more because we have more jobs that can be taken over by AI than in less developed economies, where they are doing more things that require your hands and your body and their high touch skills. So yeah, right. All right. Last piece of audio for the day, as we all panic about the future, let’s go.

George Scott 

NASA faces additional challenges to meeting its Artemis goals of utmost important is resolving technical issues that could threaten astronauts’ safety. The agency will need to do this while also addressing long standing concerns, such as unsustainable costs, unreliable project schedules, and the lack of transparency into funding needs.

Kai Ryssdal 

It’s all about the budget. That was a guy by the name of George Scott. He is the Acting Inspector General of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration testifying before the House Science Space and Technology Committee, talking about the delays in getting people back to the moon. We’re not going to send them around the moon until September of next year. And then I think the landing has been pushed to 2026. It’s, you know, for those of us who were of spacefaring mindsets, I think that’s just it’s a huge bummer. It was, it was really ambitious, I guess, to try to get it done this year. But it is kind of one is kind of a bummer.

Kimberly Adams 

But I mean, I think the bigger bummer is what you just said, that we had something ambitious and couldn’t meet that ambition. For a variety of reasons.

Kai Ryssdal 

We go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard, if I might quote John F. Kennedy.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes. I was just about to talk about Kennedy. He was just like, no, but you had the quote, and I didn’t, but just this idea that you can have a big ambition and a big dream. And he was able to sort of rally the country behind it and get it done, despite so many technical challenges. And we can’t do that anymore. Yeah. And that makes me sad.

Kai Ryssdal 

Totally. And even if you do the regression analysis for different budgetary times, and different oh, by the way, political times. It’s still a little distressing that we don’t do hard things anymore. You know?

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. I have to say when I was prepping for the show, and looking at that, and reading about some of the technical challenges that they’re having with this project. I wonder how much of that has to do with the distributed nature of this work these days compared to back then, because to get funding, a lot of these contractors and defense companies and space companies scatter their work in targeted congressional districts all over the country. So that some work is done in one place, some work is done in other, some work is done in others and then it all comes together. As opposed to, you know, everyone going to like Port Canaveral and just digging in and getting something done, or the Johnson Space Center or whatever. And having all these people together working on a problem. I wonder how much just this distributing the labor for the benefit of you know, members of Congress and donors and votes and things has contributed to how hard it is to get these projects done. I don’t know Just my suspicious. Yep. Yeah. All right. That is it for today. Please join us tomorrow for Economics on Tap with your beverage of choice. Water, mocktails, cocktails, concoctions, potions, whatever your little heart desires. The YouTube livestream starts at 6:30 Eastern, 3:30 Pacific. We will hopefully see you there.

Kai Ryssdal 

Today’s episode of this podcast which is called Make Me Smart was produced by Courtney Bergiesker. Audio engineering by Jayk Cherry. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Thalia Menchaca is our intern.

Kimberly Adams 

Marissa Cabrera is our senior producer. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts, and Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital. I still want to retire on the moon by the way.

Kai Ryssdal 

I don’t know if that’d be fun. It’d be cool for like a little while.

Kimberly Adams 

It would be exciting.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yes, that’s true. Until you get bored of the gray.

Kimberly Adams 

I like gray.

Kai Ryssdal 

Fair enough.