This is deliberate from both the left and the right to keep costs down. "AI" is ambient and no one can pin the blame on anyone.
In my industry -- software engineering -- AI is being blamed for a job market that tumbled a year before GPT even entered the mainstream. There were no code assist tools in 2022, but jobs disappeared. Nevertheless, it is easy to blame AI because it doesnt force us to really examine the causes and thus no policy changes would result.
In SWE-land, we done hire people because of three reasons
1. better open source means you dont need to build it on your own
2. More h1/h4/opt visa workers means you can have loyal and under-market pay workers without attrition risk (even Trump with all his power couldnt tackle this lobby)
3. offshore -- us healthcare and benefits are too expensive, easier to just send the work to other countries
> There were no code assist tools in 2022, but jobs disappeared.
In 2020 there was a global pandemic called COVID-19 that had a pronounced affect on the world economy. Stimulus cheques were given to companies to keep them afloat through this time. Tech companies spent that new capital on hiring and them layed off a lot of workers when they weren't able to sustain them.
A big reason you saw layoffs is because we had massive hiring sprees from short term capital through stimulus cheques.
These days, when a company tells you they are laying off good workers and replacing them, with software that cannot fact check its output, because their audience cannot tell the difference, you should believe them and consider if that is really what you want the world to become.
In my industry -- software engineering -- AI is being blamed for a job market that tumbled a year before GPT even entered the mainstream. There were no code assist tools in 2022, but jobs disappeared. Nevertheless, it is easy to blame AI because it doesnt force us to really examine the causes and thus no policy changes would result.
In SWE-land, we done hire people because of three reasons
1. better open source means you dont need to build it on your own
2. More h1/h4/opt visa workers means you can have loyal and under-market pay workers without attrition risk (even Trump with all his power couldnt tackle this lobby)
3. offshore -- us healthcare and benefits are too expensive, easier to just send the work to other countries