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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   27150 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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So, is AI coming for the programmer jobs? There's a news story in my country about Microsoft seeking redundancies globally which probably means chopping jobs here as well, and one paragraph mentions AI:

Microsoft employs around 4,000 people in Ireland, with a further 2,000 people employed at its subsidiary, Linkedin, which has a base in Dublin.

The cuts are to be implemented across several divisions and geographical offices, according to the Seattle Times, reporting from Microsoft’s global headquarters.

The tech giant has said that the layoffs are part of a restructuring effort.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently disclosed that up to a third of programming at the tech company is now done by AI, with a higher percentage likely.

However, the current cuts are thought to be aimed across several job categories, including sales and middle-management.

...The company has previously said that cuts would involve "streamlining the organisation, eliminating management layers”, with no further detail on the sectors to be targeted, other than that it intended to shrink expenses in “R&D, marketing, general and administrative” divisions.

Granted, that seems to be trimming jobs across management and admin rather than software engineers, but the little nugget about "up to a third of programming is now done by AI" does seem to be a straw in the wind. Yes? No? Just means they're not hiring new junior staff?

Almost all of these employees laid off employees will be replaced by H1-Bs (Microsoft put in for over 6000 the first two quarters this year) as well as previously announced hiring in India.

I’m not sure where AI comes in but they certainly aren’t replacing their laid-off workers with AI unless AI stands for “another Indian”.

Doing a similar standard of job for 30% of the price, or even doing the same job to an 80% standard for 30% of the price for almost all jobs is a very valid component to the merits of an individual for a job. Microsoft choosing to recognise and reward this doesn't reflect badly on either them or the person doing the job for cheap, the only person to boo here is the person who wants to extract economic rents by artificially restricting competition.

  • -10

Given that the 30% wages essentially work due to relative purchasing power and / or arbitrage between a Third World childhood and a First World adulthood, isn’t this global laissez faire approach basically poison for long-term economic growth?

If it becomes widely accepted that economic growth means an increased quality of life here and now, but that the window of opportunity only lasts maybe 1.5 generations before your (grand)children are priced out of the global market, that seems to make growth and laissez faire economics a much tougher sell.

I’m not convinced that most people make decisions on that timescale.

It’s the kind of sentiment that convinced communists the world revolution was coming any…minute…now.

It's only poison for disproportionate economic growth of your country relative to the other countries of the world. It's poison for a selfish country level view of the planet yes, but that is not a bad thing; much like how pesticide is poison for aphids but is very much a good thing. If you support policies that lead to long term global growth instead of merely localized growth then this laissez faire approach isn't bad at all, in fact it's the fastest way to get global GDP growing as fast as possible.

No, I mean that it’s going to make it much harder to get any democratic buy in if people who have already experienced growth think that you’re dooming them to decline, people in third world understand that they’re going to get at best two generations of growth and then decline, etc.

I.e. it’s poison for the idea of economic growth, which up until now was mostly regarded positively.

Why would people in the third world only get two generations of growth and then decline? They catch up to the west and then the great vehicle takes forward all of humanity towards higher and higher levels of economic welfare all together. It's not too much to expect rich developed countries to become economic Bodhisattvas, they will always be at least as far along the path of enightenment luxury gay space communism as everyone else.

If one wishes to escape the cycle of Samsara boom and bust there is no other alternative.

I don’t think it’s the case that, under the near-100% global fluidity you seem to be arguing for, the west will continue to remain ahead. That is, I don’t necessarily see why economic growth should be sticky under conditions of high global fluidity.

At the moment, Britain (say) is in relative decline. Because we once had a very large market and because companies serving that have mostly been staffed by British people for various reasons, that decline has been slow. Say, Toyota sets up a car factory in Sunderland to build cars for the British market; that factory is mostly staffed by British people by virtue of being in Britain and because of various employment laws, meaning that a decent number of British people are earning a decent salary, meaning that the market for Toyota cars in Britain is still decently sized, etc. But the decline is still present because (among other things) Britain is expensive and therefore British workers require global-market-beating salaries to live well.

Under conditions of maximal global liquidity, I would expect to see accelerated growth and decline, with some countries entering into the India/Taiwan/China/Japan role of ‘cheap country where multinationals can get decent work for low prices’ and other countries declining to that point or past that point and waiting for their time to get back in the spotlight.

(Countries might decline past the ‘spotlight point’ because factories etc. benefit from synergy and investment tends to cluster, so even if several countries have favourable economic conditions only one of them might win the prize at any given time.)

In short, to my mind, the maximally fluid world looks like it would accelerate boom and bust for any given country (or its native population) rather than lead to ratchet growth spread globally. I think it would be hard to get public support for that - first world countries wouldn’t want to sign up for accelerated decline from their current position, and third world countries want to be able to protect their economic growth once they have it.

Yeah, I get the impression they want to reduce headcount and salary costs, so the admin and management and sales will get the hit rather than the programmers, but there may well be an eye on "do we really need to hire some kid out of college at a high salary when we can just get our pet AI/five Indian coders to do it for us cheaper?"

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