And last year they were all saying some variation on “don’t worry, AI is not going to cost anyone their jobs.”
Key take away for anyone is to never trust what an executive is saying. Much like a politician, if their lips are moving they are probably lying.
Developers: I could use AI to increase my output and productivity while better testing code and coming up with unique ways to speed up runtimes!
CEO: We could do the same output with less people!
Shareholders: we can have the same profit without a CEO!
Producing more doesn’t automatically mean you will sell more. If that was true then why do manufacturers intentionally cut production?
Because software isn’t something tangible that must go into the shelves. If you sell 1 or sell a billion copies the difference in costs is negligible. Completely different for physical objects where you need to produce just enough or if you make a nice cartel you can produce less and increase the prices.
That makes the point just as well. Company X uses AI to put software out even faster but the demand didn’t suddenly manifest from nowhere so they sold the same amount. What do they do with the extra time? Sure they can work on something new, but there’s probably an equal chance they keep release cycles the same and get rid of dead weight (i.e. people).
Artificial scarcity…
But seriously, production for physical goods, you slow down because there’s too many on the shelves. I’m more talking about digital goods like app development. For them Production means features. The only time you scale back is that you either don’t know what features your buyers want, you can’t sell what you have produced, you have no bugs (which never happens), or you are trying save money/balance budgets where you don’t make enough to pay for the development teams.