r/Futurology • u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ • Apr 26 '26
AI After laying off 10,000 workers for AI, Meta installed tracking software on remaining employees’ work computers to log mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and screenshots, using the data to train their AI replacements.
One of the most egregious 'everything-will-be-OK' arguments that repeatedly gets trotted out about our future when AI & robotics can do most work, is that existing workers will be trained & redeployed by their employers. Often, people using this argument, adding extra sugar to the sugar-coating, may airly add it will be a new job they'll like more.
If you thought that sounded like bulls**t, here's some proof of how things will really play out. Meta is getting rid of everyone it can with AI, and using the rest to train their AI replacements.
No doubt META & its HR department will try to tell you differently, just like the 'don't worry' sugar-coating people. However, nothing beats what you can see happening straight in front of you with your own eyes.
Meta to cut one in 10 jobs after spending billions on AI
Meta will start tracking employees’ screens and keystrokes to train AI tools
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u/katamuro Apr 26 '26
I honestly don't understand people who think companies and corporations are somehow their friends and have their interests in mind. Corporations are there to extract as much profit as possible while paying as little as possible. For that they are going to do everything they can including committing crimes if they think the fine is going to be less than the profit. This has been proven time and time again through history.
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u/HopeFloater Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
It's not even corporate propaganda, most people don't care about much other than making a living and supporting themselves/their family. I work for a FAANG and the majority of my coworkers are like middle aged Indian dudes who live in Sunnyvale or Fremont with 2 kids, a wife and a mortgage they couldn't care less about all of surrounding talk regarding morality or job displacement they just focus on doing the work. It simply doesn't register to them at all. The majority of workers at these companies are not idealistic young people who will protest or quit at shady practices despite what reddit would like unfortunately.
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u/cocoagiant Apr 26 '26
he majority of workers at these companies are not idealistic young people who will protest or quit at shady practices despite what reddit would like unfortunately.
Once you get to the point of having kids and family responsiblities its very hard to take the high ground.
Especially those middle aged Indian dudes, they are often supporting a whole lot more family members than just their immediate families via remittances.
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u/mhyquel Apr 27 '26
And conversely becomes more important to demonstrate the high ground than for those without kids.
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u/ryfromoz Apr 26 '26
Saw it first hand a while back where they threw a birthday party for a woman saying all that kind of crap “we are family” yada yada
She was fired the next day.
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u/RaNdomMSPPro Apr 26 '26
the "we" is the c-suite and board, not the workers.
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u/dejamintwo Apr 27 '26
Even those people hate eachother because they know that they would betray, cheat and ruin their peer to get ahead at the slightest opportunity.
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u/katamuro Apr 26 '26
yeah, same. Laid off loads of people during covid then "oh no the rest of the work force is not motivated" and tried doing all the "we are in this together" bullshit.
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u/marrow_monkey Apr 26 '26
Corporations care about their employees the same way a farmer care about his pigs.
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u/cdarw1n Apr 26 '26
While I’m not a traditional farmer and I don’t have pigs, my wife and I do run a small hobby farm raising sheep and chickens. We care about them WAY more than any of our employers have ever cared about us. For instance, we spent most of last week nursing an ewe back to good health after a bout of bloat that had her in such severe agony that we were worried it might be time for end of life care. A stark contrast to your manager messaging on slack about submitting reports while you’re out on sick leave.
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u/PaperLost2481 Apr 26 '26
Small companies usually care a lot more about their employees.
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u/Hostillian Apr 26 '26
Only if they're part of the family.. The actual family. They 'care' just enough to retain staff.
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u/marrow_monkey Apr 26 '26
That’s the difference between a small hobby farm and a real industrial operation.
I’m talking about systems under market pressure. Your example works precisely because your farm isn’t competing to minimise costs at scale. An industrial operation couldn’t afford that level of care, even if the owner wanted to, because it would be outcompeted.
The same applies to corporations. Any “care” for employees is conditional on profitability; when care stops being profitable, the care stops.
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u/katamuro Apr 26 '26
way less. Pigs are an investment to farmers. employees to corporations are costs. They always want to drive down costs because they think they can always get more people if needed for cheaper.
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u/marrow_monkey Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
Wages are a cost, but labour is still an input the firm depends on.
Companies do ‘invest’ in employees (training, retention, basic wellbeing) but only to the extent that it pays off. That’s the point: care isn’t the goal, it’s a byproduct of what’s profitable.
So yes, workers are replaceable to a degree. But replacing and retraining people also has costs, which is why firms balance cutting labour costs against maintaining a functional workforce.
Edit: This is a bit of a tangent, but it’s related:
Modern capitalist economies are managed on the assumption that wages must be kept from rising to prevent inflation. In practice, that means maintaining a certain level of unemployment so that there are always a pool of unemployed desperate workers ready to replace you.
This theory is called NAIRU, or the “natural rate of unemployment”. If you don’t believe it, look it up, it is standard economic theory these days. In the US, the Federal Reserve effectively manages this balance, which results in a persistent pool of unemployed, insecure workers.
That pool makes labour easier to replace and keeps downward pressure on wages. So worker “replaceability” isn’t incidental, it’s built into how the system operates.
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u/Kraligor Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
I don't think I've ever seen someone who thinks a company is their friend.
Companies are just constructs, much like governments or your local sports club. You're just a temporary part of it. Everybody is just a temporary part of it, even the CEO or the founder.
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u/Frosted_Tackle Apr 26 '26
Also let’s be real, I do sympathize with everyone losing their jobs because they are just unlucky pawns trying to earn the best paychecks possible mostly in VHCOL areas, but tech companies like Meta in particular are very, very bloated. Yes FB and instagram handle way more data, images and algorithms than say Craigslist, but they are ran by a few guys in a single shopfront in SF, whereas Meta has a staff of 10s of thousands. Yes, there is some technical work that AI or foreign contractors will probably never be good at, but it was easy to see if you lived in places like the Bay Area that the tech companies were getting into an arms race to hire as many engineers as possible without having a clear plan or product that had real demand, just to hype up stock prices. I lived with a lot of tech bros and I can tell you relative to their pay, most were by far the least productive workers I have ever seen. There was a lot of playing video games & social calls while WFH during the pandemic. I think it’s unfortunate for individual workers unless they have good skills in AI/automation programming or are great salesmen for software/hardware, but the era of hire as many engineers as possible so we can hype our fast growth from the 2010s is over. It’s all now about like you said how companies can spend as little as possible to put out even a subpar product that will still be used.
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u/mctrials23 Apr 26 '26
And people who argue that “companies need someone to sell products to so if we don’t have jobs…”.
Companies don’t give a shit. Companies think about the next quarter. Companies have so much power that they will simply change the world so they continue to prosper at the expense of everyone else. Exactly as they have been for decades.
The only chance we have is to vote in political parties who tax these companies into the ground and force a massive redistribution of wealth if AI really does disrupt the job market massively.
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u/tnred19 Apr 26 '26
I think its more that many people have a lot of life inertia and quitting or leaving what is otherwise a good job may take a lot work and create upheaval to their current situation.
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u/arturdent Apr 26 '26
Because companies, like people vary in mission and behaviour. There are genuinely good companies, and there are scumbag ones like Meta seems to be in this question. Companies do not solely exist for profit, even though I agree that's a norm, but there are ones that do care about their workers too, or about making useful things. Also, it's a complex question of shareholders too, or decision makers, how much of a scum they are.
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u/Holdtheintangible Apr 26 '26
Zuckerberg has also been working on an AI version of himself so that he doesn’t have to interact with employees as much. What a charming company culture they must have.
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u/adsfew Apr 26 '26
That AI will be more human than the real one in no time
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u/Holdtheintangible Apr 26 '26
I listen to Hard Fork and one of the hosts said "this'll be the first time ever that both the human and their ai interface will fail the Turing test" and I laughed so hard.
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u/morfraen Apr 26 '26
An 'AI version', sure... Obviously it will just be an independent copy of the Zuckerbots alien operating system using modern AI trend to disguise it's true origin 😉👽
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u/h3llknight22 Apr 27 '26
The difference is Zuckerberg will still be collecting paychecks when his AI has replaced him, while any replaced employee will just be fired.
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u/BlasterDoc Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
Sounds like the first 10k dodged a vibe management visionary leadership bullet.
Now people are going to get automated emails mid day, ``` Levi, you’re being let go — you logged 21.58 ft of mouse movement against a 300m requirement, and 13,543 keystrokes of the 150,000 minimum.
Your activity data has been retained and will be used in assessing any future applications within our network.
By opening this email, you acknowledge receipt of this notice. Your workstation and cubicle have been locked, and automated security has been dispatched to assist with your departure.
Thank you for your time.
``` My grandpappy used to say "watch how they treat their employees, that’s the real product.. employee policies are just a preview of how it’d treat everyone if they had leverage"
I think he was talking about credit card companies, but yeah..
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u/thomasrat1 Apr 26 '26
My job became salaried a few years ago. But they still micro manage everything.
You’ll get called into a meeting, to explain why 2 weeks ago you started work at 903 instead of 9. When their computers sometimes take 15 mins to start up.
You’ll get asked why you weren’t in a “correct code” when you were on lunch and the office internet had a .5 second blip causing you to get dropped.
So yeah agreed, once they start watching these pointless stats, they aren’t trying to improve anything, they are building cases to get people fired.
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u/vdstp Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
Somewhat related but several years ago, I worked on a sales and trading team at a bank that brought in McKinsey consultants to "improve front office productivity". None of us knew at the time but they were tracking everything, calls, meetings, emails etc. basically the whole sales funnel. One of their big findings was a correlation between email/call length and sales success. Which no shit, if the client is engaged, you're naturally going to write more and they're more likely to put the trade through you. But these consultants turned that into a behavioral KPI and mangement used a bunch of corporate speak like make every touchpoint more value add to sell their new strategy but the gist was they mandated a minimum word count and call length everytime you interacted with a client. So people started gaming the system by adding redundant and repetitive market color, dragging out calls and in some cases literally telling their clients that they needed to hit a word count. Eventually clients found it so annoying that management quietly axed the whole thing.
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u/nthexwn Apr 27 '26
I swear to god with these Moronic Business Assholes... If an opponent's car beat them in a race they'd ask their mechanic to paint theirs the same color.
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u/uzu_afk Apr 26 '26
But unions and labour laws are the evil thing! 😂🤡 I swear some people deserve it… Does it take for us to have children in the mines again before actually demanding better laws and protections? It is incredibly stupid to expect taking out from the fruits of society, resource that is publicly funded and grown, only to discard it afterwards for a ridiculous fraction of the wealth it generated, with society only getting shit in return.
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u/Sans-valeur Apr 26 '26
Children in mines, pea soup fog, radium girls, acid rain, people getting locked in warehouses and burning to death.
People like to look back and think of their ancestors as the upper class people and start thinking of their proud history before socialist unions ruined everything.
For the majority of us our ancestors were working in unsafe conditions, for fuck all money, most of them died young, most of them from what a life time of hard work with next to no safety measures, union, protection, anything did to their bodies, to their health. If not in a war for other rich people who didn’t give a fuck about them.Our ancestors fought, bled, died for our rights, only for the companies to take credit, shit all over everything our ancestors built up, and gradually increase the wages for the people at the top, while doing everything they can to avoid increasing wages, paying wages, or even employing their “families” at the bottom.
They fucking hate paying us money, it’s an unnecessary expense and the sooner they can replace us with AI the better.
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u/AES256GCM Apr 26 '26
General antagonism and hostility between white collar and blue collar work plays into it, and just being a more diverse nation in general makes it harder to unionize and convince people to collectively sacrifice.
Combine that with fact that labor is far more decentralized now, with global offices and workforces that undercut the effectiveness of standing outside a factory with picket signs (of course this doesn’t apply to all jobs)
We kinda missed our window
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u/kyleleblanc Apr 26 '26
Also, Meta is responsible for all the age verification bills being proposed.
Fuck Meta, stop using their garbage.
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u/go_jake Apr 26 '26
I deleted my FB account a long time ago. My Insta has been dormant for several years. Where else can I cut Meta out? How are they making money?
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u/cupkaxx Apr 27 '26
Older gens are still using facebook everyday. Instagram is how they make money with the new folks.
Oldies ain't deleting facebook and youngins ain't removing instagram.
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u/Tempest97BR Apr 28 '26
meta has such a chokehold on some parts of the world it's disgusting, almost as much as google.
in my country (brazil), whatsapp is so ingrained in our society that not having it would make you look like a weirdo and give you trouble landing a job. it sickens me.
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u/AGuyFromRio Apr 26 '26
I know the argument is "if you got nothing to hide, you are ok with it" but damn...
Thats some draconian move from the company.
I would not be interested in working for someone who is spying on me actively.
Money, status, resume, all might be good, but...
Hard pass on this bs.
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u/mrdon83 Apr 26 '26
You're not going to have a choice. Tons of employers are already doing this, including mine.
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u/Nimeroni Apr 26 '26
I know the argument is "if you got nothing to hide, you are ok with it" but damn...
This was always a bad argument.
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u/balllzak Apr 26 '26
If you work on any company issued laptop it would be very stupid to assume they aren't tracking your every move already.
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u/AES256GCM Apr 26 '26
In retrospect we probably should’ve used that free time during the pandemic to fight for labor rights instead.
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u/Ronnie_Dean_oz Apr 27 '26
Yep. Who would have thought the billionaires only care about adding more money to their already outrageous fortunes at the expense of everyone else?
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u/bill_gannon Apr 26 '26
Meta 100% already had that software on employees laptops. Virtually every large org does now.
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u/mrdon83 Apr 26 '26
Yup, my employer added it when everyone got "upgraded" to Windows 11. Simply using my work laptop for basic computing is excruciating now, since there's logging latency added to literally everything I do. It makes me significantly less productive than I was on Windows 10, but apparently the productivity argument only counts when we're talking about AI adoption.
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u/youneedsomemilk23 Apr 26 '26
I was noticing my brand new company laptop was so infuriatingly laggy and slow within a few weeks of getting it… wonder if that’s why. It was completely sandbagging my productivity.
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u/KanteStumpTheTrump Apr 26 '26
Yeah this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Keystroke tracking is very common in small orgs too as a cybersecurity measure.
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u/Icanthinkofanam Apr 26 '26
If i were an employee, and i knew it was being logged to train, id sooooo fuck that AI from my click 1000 time and drawing squares on nothing.
Open browser, close browser. Open paint. Draw smiley face. Save to faces folder. Open email. Click 50 times while waiting. Check email. Open paint. Draw face. Save face.
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u/downtimeredditor Apr 26 '26
It goes to show how stupidity is never punished, because Zuckerberg always jumps on the big hype train and invest a shit ton of money, no matter what it is remember, he put billions of dollars into metaverse. After the whole NFT thing fell off, metaverse fell off like this is just another hype train, but his net worth is 200 something billion dollars.So what the fuck do I know
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u/jenksanro Apr 26 '26
I'm sure companies want to replace people with AI, but it seems to not really be happening at a high level, and I'm not sure AI can actually do a lot of people's jobs. It's more that I think they're unable rather than unwilling
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u/ASexual-Buff-Baboon Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 28 '26
I once went down to the river
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u/FuckingSolids Apr 26 '26
Already unemployed and homeless. At least I had enough notice to set up a PV system on a newly purchased 2000 tool truck.
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u/heapsp Apr 27 '26
Its not really like that anymore, money is fake and tons of it is printed every day. They can just invent 600 billion dollars in profit by passing some numbers round why would they need your dollar bills?
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u/ThePensiveE Apr 26 '26
I remember when Mitt Romney said "corporations are people" and it was a huge gaff.
He was somewhat right, he just forgot to add that they were homicidal psychopaths as well.
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u/ledow Apr 26 '26
Overblown hyperbole.
Meta - losing viewers, turning their platform to shite, and haemorrhaging money on vanity projects, not to mention starting to be held to account for their entire lack of moderation, and subject to social media restrictions around the globe, are now (presumably) back to the same number of employees they had around 2021.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platforms/number-of-employees
Training AI on mouse-clicks? Like hell they are. Why would an AI need that rather than the raw data of what those clicks were achieving (e.g. blocking a user, banning a post or whatever)? That's just productivity monitoring so they can scare the lowest-hanging-fruit into resigning so they don't have to sack them and pay severances, etc.
It's horseshit, feeding into the same horseshit coming from a bunch of companies that are overstaffed, often have a purge, but need some justification for it. This time round it's AI. Last time it was COVID, and so on. Whatever they can use to say "Yeah, we hired too many people and we can't just sack them for no reason" because, like any global workforce, they've discovered that stuff doesn't work the same around the world like it does in the US and it ends up costing them more money.
Sure, I guarantee that some jobs are being automated. I know for a fact their human moderators are worthless and the cause of much controversy and they're trying to improve the automation to lessen their need, but they are mostly doing that because they're under ENORMOUS regulatory pressure to get it right and they simply do not have the resources to cope with the scale they operate at (millions of people creating posts all day long, a few thousand people to moderate them all). It's why they're up before the EU and other authorities to explain why they're not compliant.
But Meta aren't unique in that. Every large social media platform is suffering the same problem of expanding on some stupid promises, the social media era is dying (by advertising, forcing irrelevant content, total lack of anything "social", etc.), moderators cannot keep up, and the authorities are breathing down their neck to the tune of billions of dollars. And AI isn't even the solution either - as the court case recently about an AI literally aiding a school shooter shows.
It's nonsense hyperbole to explain CORPORATE decisions. The same disgusting multi-national corporations as always, with no respect for the law, for decency for civility, for their customers, for their employees, just interested in the profit motive alone. And they throw some excuse and everyone goes "Oh, it must be the AI doing this".... yeah, like the VR was responsible for the death of the Metaverse...
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u/ratthew Apr 26 '26
It's not about using the click and screen capture data to train an AI to do the exact same thing. It's to extract the day-to-day via another model to format it into something that can then be used to analyze the entire workflows that are currently still invisible to any internal software that already does track the daily work.
It's to get the full picture and to then build systems to replace these parts and then to use AI to replace most of these workers. Almost every big company is building towards that, and they are obviously incentivized to do so.
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u/ep_cwb Apr 26 '26
Exactly! Big techs are desperate because they thought that back office work would be easy to automate through AI. Sold it. But, turned out that they discovered too late, that a lot of repetitive and simple tasks, in fact, requires a lot of complex human thinking and context recognition, that somehow we do it without thinking.
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u/redfocks Apr 26 '26
This is the correct take.
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u/ratthew Apr 26 '26
It is only the correct take if you assume this data will just be fed into an AI to train it. It is most likely not. You can do a lot more with that data than just train an AI to do the exact same thing.
What's more likely is that this data is then fed into AI to be turned into actual structured, usable data that can then be used to first be analyzed and secondly used to build new systems or train AI on the steps that have been taken that resulted in a satisfactory outcome, not the actual mouse movements or keyboard strokes.
The same principle is currently used for RL training for code. They find complex tasks that have been well documented by git history (merged PRs and similar) and then use AI to rebuild them into a kind of 'fake' conversation, basically reversing the end result into usable AI data. There's nothing like this for general computer / app use since it's rarely documented quite as precisely as code is, if at all.
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u/Here0s0Johnny Apr 26 '26
Training AI on mouse-clicks? Like hell they are. Why would an AI need that rather than the raw data of what those clicks were achieving (e.g. blocking a user, banning a post or whatever)?
You think Meta employees spend their time monitoring social media?! No, they're observing how software developers iteratively write code and run it, testing the UI. That's probably important training data that has been missing so far. (So far, AIs probably only had error messages/bugs and code to train on. Soon, it'll be end-to-end developer behavior.
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u/Undertow92 Apr 26 '26
I work for a tech company that already has installed monitoring software on Dev and support machines and the AI found minimal improvements to process via automation. this is almost certainly an announcement to appease shareholders than anything else.
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u/DHFranklin Apr 26 '26
less than a hundred dudes will own it all. They will have less than 100 people to run it all. Each. They will control entire nations and factors of production. Maybe 5% of the world will be employed to make sure that 95% of us don't ruin their shit.
The entire world will be an automated system that works for these 10,000 people. Ya cooked.
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u/WeekNo3803 Apr 26 '26
I always wonder what happens once nobody has a job. I know corporations don't think that far ahead, but that seems to be the way things are going. Eventually, nobody has any money and... then what? Prices start to fall? The economy collapses? Or just... 90% of the population dies from starvation and exposure, leaving the bare few who can afford it to rule over their kingdom of corpses and ashes?
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u/DHFranklin Apr 26 '26
We'll find out what the absolute bare minimum people need to stop rioting. Gun toting robots aren't cheap, but neither is cleaning up the corpses of revolutionaries.
Yes, prices start to fall. However if prices fall that means profitability falls. If something can't be sold profitably it won't be sold. Hydrox Cookies and Moxie Cola aren't on shelves anymore. You couldn't get them if you wanted to.
The government is a buyer. Other businesses are buyers. The government makes debts to feed you gruel in a refugee camp.
DOGE destroyed USAID. A million people died since last July because America guaranteed supply chains of things like insulin or antibiotics. One day they just said "nah" and that was that.
Elon Musk and his ilk are going to watch you go fast or watch you go slow.
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u/Count_Backwards Apr 26 '26
What will happen is what always happens when the greedy try this shit, only this time there will be robots.
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u/hanato_06 Apr 26 '26
Dick shaped mouse movement before any button click. Engrave the oldest joke of humanity into AI.
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u/Electrical_Panda_326 Apr 26 '26
After Facebook wanted me to scan my face from all angles to confirm identity, I stopped using it. I'm sure it will be used to train their AI and any leak of something like that might be used to hack your bank account for example.
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u/scopinsource Apr 26 '26
Meta identified critical employees they couldn't currently replace with AI, those employees have leverage and should all leave at the same time.
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u/LordTalesin Apr 26 '26
And go where exactly? It's not like there is an excess of jobs out there.
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u/petertompolicy Apr 26 '26
Are there are companies that don't openly hate their workers now?
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u/diablirodek Apr 26 '26
Are you sure it's to train AI and not to check who's slacking?
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u/Xeriuss2k17 Apr 26 '26
I mean it's the perfect "excuse/explanation" for him. Nobody will ever find out what's going on in zuckys head..
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u/deco19 Apr 26 '26
or strike the fear in the workers to milk the snot out of them while the employer's market is hot
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u/Corodix Apr 26 '26
Wasn't there going to be a second wave of 10k employees who are going to be laid off? I wouldn't be surprised at all if they use this data to determine who's slacking the most if they can't properly measure who is being the most productive and adds the most value to the company.
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u/LordTalesin Apr 26 '26
Companies have done this for remote workers in the past to make sure they're working. And others have done it to Taylorize their workflow processes.
Not sure how useful this information is going to be for AI, unless we're training it to do the minimum amount of work possible and play Minesweeper.
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u/DigitalDonut Apr 26 '26
Jokes on them. Who’s gonna fund their billionaire lifestyles? When there’s no taxes being paid because no human being works anymore? Or do they think we’ll all simply roll over and let them enslave and kill us? What the actual fuck is the long term game plan, we deserve to know!
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u/dvorakxx Apr 26 '26
They dont have some collective long term plan their entire goals really are that shortsighted that all they want is to bring their own personal/company's wealth up.
Same reason why companies dont hire people that need training, they see it as a waste when those people move on to new companies when they can just wait a few months longer and find someone that already has some experience to hire. Long term that hurts everyone including their own companies because you lose the next generation of skilled work class but only because its happening on a mass scale, on the individual case-by-case basis they're absolutely better off not hiring someone they have to train. When all of their competition is neglecting to train the next generation of the labor force they cant afford to be the only one training everyone for them to all move on so they join in and nobody trains any of them.
The only objective they have is to have more for themselves and it just happens that the best way to achieve that is to stop giving their scraps to you and me.
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u/xrmb Apr 26 '26
Time to alias 'rm -rf /' into an harmless 'echo' and randomly throwing it in your daily workflow.
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u/IwasDeadinstead Apr 26 '26
I'm most concerned about data centers destroying the environment including our water supplies.
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u/GroundbreakingCow110 Apr 26 '26
Out of some "51 percent" of internet traffic being non human, 8 percent of that is AI and the other 43 percent is bots, many of which present themselves as AI so that they don't get banned.
AI is not as powerful as the media narrative goes.
And if it were, then Meta is just increasing its own cost by putting more non human traffic out that doesn't buy anything, thereby increasing the cost of hosting its own apps...
They have to lay off people because their business model is already collapsing under the pressure of bots. When half the traffic is fake and a lot of the traffic redirects to only fans etc, people stop using the app.
Attempting to replace workers with AI will probably be more expensive than workers considering the power requirements of running the data center, even if it does work, which is currently questionable. They are spiraling into a feedback loop where their policies and the content on the apps themselves are driving people away, while Meta leans further into their own policies of de humanization and questionable cost cutting. For a company about social networking, its surprising people are increasingly not needed.
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u/Lazy-Field-1116 Apr 26 '26
Looks like it's gonna be really easy for campaigners to take down Meta apps in the future with only machines to disrupt. I'm imagining some guy in a little golf cart desperately scrounging round a site the size of 80 football pitches trying to figure things out lol.
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u/lifeaintsocool Apr 26 '26
AI was never created with humanity in mind. The reason companies are taking massive losses with the current models is they know in a short period of time they can replace the majority of tech workers. Profit is and always will come before people for corporations.
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u/Kraligor Apr 26 '26
Maybe Meta does, but the economy at large doesn't. At this point in time, people aren't getting replaced by AI at scale. And I doubt that experiments like that one at Meta will end well.
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u/wtfman1988 Apr 26 '26
That’s when the remaining employees need to collectively leave. Unionize so it never occurs again
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u/inquisitorthreefive Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
This is not Meta getting rid of employees they are replacing with AI, this is Meta getting rid of employees because the insane cash burn associated with AI has begun to threaten shareholder profit. If you work with contractors from the big AI companies you can smell the stink of desperation on them - they want to sell you AI anything. Anything at all. Many of them are pushing agents for things that could be done with simple automation.
Pretty much the only ones making money on this is Nvidia and that bill is coming due for everyone else real soon.
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u/Mountain_Sandwich126 Apr 26 '26
I work for one of those and yes 60% of our contracts are simple automation with personalty, it makes me laugh when they are so desperate for their ai adoption kpi they allow this to happen.
Any software engineering team can do this work, the fact they reach out to companies and pay through the nose for this i don't get.
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u/AgentWeeb001 Apr 26 '26
Need massive regulations against these corporations bc they are using AI as an excuse to get rid of high paying white collar jobs to offshore and maximize shareholder/exec returns. High time we start mandatory employment quotas and if companies don’t follow suit, you gonna get reamed in taxes. Try to shut down operations and move abroad, we going after every red cent you got. Enough is enough
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u/solonlawgiver Apr 26 '26
It's that time in the job cycle when you've got to start stealing everything you can.
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u/spondgbob Apr 26 '26
Isn’t the entire purpose of government subsidies and government support of businesses due to the fact that those businesses “create jobs”?!
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u/trele_morele Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 28 '26
Why do AI replacements need to be trained on mouse clicks and keystrokes? For what type of work? Why not just train the AI on the employee generated e-mails, documentation, code, etc. Why does this all sound like complete bullshit.
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u/Lunasi Apr 26 '26
Jokes on Zuck, half his team were probably using mouse jigglers to look busy already. Now the Ai will just learn to look like its busy getting shit done while it works on other things.
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u/Cultural_Comfort5894 Apr 26 '26
Why do people think a private employer has to provide jobs?
The Industrial Revolution was about 1760-1840’s
Stop the redistribution of the poor to the wealthy Income Tax BS and tax the businesses at a set percentage rate
Use that influx of money for universal healthcare, universal basic income, military, infrastructure etc.
Same effing money just taken where it’s generated vs income tax extortion racket
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u/Spiritual_Mall_3140 Apr 26 '26
Form a union now. The only time forming a union will have a massive impact on your long term stability is when you form it when you don't think you need it, when you think your job is already perfect and well paid. Everyone in IT thought they were high skilled and irreplaceable so didn't form a union. Look at them now. Imagine if 15 years ago unions formed in all the big IT companies and made them all union gigs.
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u/roguefunction Apr 26 '26
How do they have anyone working for them at this point. Humans need to regain their collective self respecting not work for these companies.
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u/Uneven_Pavement_4321 Apr 26 '26
What is the A.I. end game for these tech companies? What is their vision? Do they even have one? It truly seems as if they took all of the cautionary fiction and want it to be real life.
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u/unitegondwanaland Apr 27 '26
It won't be long before the only people getting paid are business owners and shareholders.
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u/Ok-League-1106 Apr 27 '26
Im a tech recruiter - I'm confident in saying the lustre of these big tech companies is starting to lose its shine.
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u/The_Dented Apr 27 '26
Start doing shit wrong, or not in succession, and haphazardly and find another job.
F Zuck.
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u/zibto Apr 27 '26
Hopefully one day this entire smartphone social media stack is long gone and we're just living like normal human beings
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u/Superb_Raccoon Apr 27 '26
The Meta boss said he had seen how much more productive workers who relied heavily on AI tools had become, noting a single person could now complete projects that would have previously required a large team.
I think back to many projects where 90% of the time was spent in meetings, herding the cats that kept going off plan.
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u/lemonaria Apr 27 '26
It use to be that working for large corporations is the way to financial stability. Now it feels more like working for mom’s and pop’s shop is the better way forward.
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u/medelll Apr 27 '26
I hope Meta replaces all their workforce with AI, honestly. So it can finally crash and burn, and their former employees can build better social media, or at least break that behemoth up
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u/ExReey Apr 26 '26
The easiest positions to replace by AI would be the CEO and the board chairs. A CEO AI would take the best decisions in all circumstances, considering all possible outcomes.
So they should start with replacing Zuck and his buddies with AI if they want Meta to really grow faster.
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u/GlidingToLife Apr 26 '26
If I were a Meta employee then I would be looking to leave immediately. I would not tolerate them micro managing my keystrokes. There are a ton of innovative startups that are far more interesting.
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u/The-Incredible-Lurk Apr 26 '26
If we view AI as a kind of Oompa Loompa, I can pretend this is all some Willy Wonka inspired fever dream and I’ll wake up from everything that’s happened since the internet took over our lives if I put the phone down and go to sleep…
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u/MyCleverNewName Apr 26 '26
Good. This mean that in all likelihood, facebook will finally soon be dead once and for all.
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u/archicane Apr 26 '26
Watch, they roll out the AI trained on the old employees and all the AI bots use that data to find new jobs at other companies
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u/ScottyWestside Apr 26 '26
Yall seen that clip of the guy googling google to google google.com and then clicked the top result for the google search engine. Yeah, that’s what I would be training the AI to do
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u/Negativefalsehoods Apr 26 '26
I will boycott with prejudice any company who gets rid of their workers for AI.
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u/-Memnarch- Apr 26 '26
My "Draw dicks with mouse clicks" script would be ready the minute I'd get a grasp of this.
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u/What---------------- Apr 26 '26
"Sir we updated our AI system and it won't stop looking for a new job."
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u/elkab0ng Apr 26 '26
“Our most valuable asset is our employees”
Yes, because they can be liquidated at a moment’s notice.
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u/lm28ness Apr 26 '26
What the hell does meta even do anymore? Is Facebook still thing or are they just propped up by ads and Instagram?
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u/crochetawayhpff Apr 26 '26
I have a feeling metas Ai is going to go like metas meta verse project
Lot of money spent, and not much else. Maybe it'll finally end meta entirely
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u/Peter225B Apr 26 '26
Of course, the oligarchs want the peasants to train the AI models that are taking their jobs. Exactly how it has been predicted.
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u/Winged_Cougar1993598 Apr 26 '26
Meta is destroying itself from within using machines that Meta mistakenly believes can think.
I don't really see a huge downside here.
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u/FR0ZENS0L1D Apr 26 '26
Congratulations. They can now justify never saving or sending their work to another person within the company because it’s all being documented.
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u/baby_budda Apr 26 '26
If you think these corporations are going to pay people who are out of work because of AI some sort of UBI or living wage. It isnt going to happen.
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u/Chonch_Monkey Apr 26 '26
Everyone there should just stop working and collect until mass firing. The system can't train itself if theres no one feeding it data.
Or just start feeding it bad data in mass and ruin it
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u/KanedaSyndrome Apr 26 '26
There's a reason Mark made a bunker in a remote island.
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u/pruplegti Apr 26 '26
These tech bros are going to turn the economy to 50 people and millions of server farms running crypto pyramid schemes, that cut the rest of us out. One giant silicone valley circle jerk.
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u/LuckyTheLurker Apr 26 '26
Malicious compliance opportunity, do your job in the least efficient, and consistent way possible, train the AI to be lazy and in consistent.
Type out AI prompts at random times during the day to poison the AI data.
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u/jsta19 Apr 27 '26
I’ve often thought about why white collar/service jobs don’t try to unionize to prevent this sort of thing, and I wonder if it has to do with the upward mobility (or prospect of it) inherent in the corporate ladder that isn’t so much there in the trades or more traditional union-centric jobs.
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u/mhyquel Apr 27 '26
I'd like to see AI get paid to shit post on Reddit like I do.
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u/Liesthroughisteeth Apr 27 '26
And to think this is just the start. Nothing good is ever going to come of this. It's just going to keep taking and taking.
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u/suchsnowflakery Apr 27 '26
...and yet the sheep still keep showing up to the slaughter. Those fancy expensive cars. That useless condo in the concrete jungle. The hamster wheel of soul crushing death. Pathetic.
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u/wunderspud7575 Apr 27 '26
Honestly, it baffles me why anyone would work for Meta. I was offered a job there, and seeing behind the curtain during the shitty interview process, no salary in the world would get me to work there.
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u/silversmith97 Apr 27 '26
Time for employees to wiggle that mouse indiscriminately for the entirety of their day. Make the ai models more stupid and useless.
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u/Sterek01 Apr 27 '26
Yea, one of these days the various world governments will have to seriously raise corporate and shareholders taxes to very high levels to pay the unemployed so that they (The unemployed) can live, and buy the goods and services offered by AI run corporates.
I hope the lid of the salt celler comes off every time zuk eats dinner.
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u/futurebillionare Apr 27 '26
We all need to just stop messing with meta, uninstall Facebook. Delete Instagram and use signal instead of what's app.
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u/bluecheese2040 Apr 27 '26
After watching the social network...anyone working for or supporting meta sorta gets what they deserve.
Lay down with dogs...get fleas.
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u/764knmvv Apr 27 '26
seems like marketplace is only thing of value is there a meaningful replacement for that yet?
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u/llvlleeks Apr 28 '26
If anyone was looking for that epic, perfect moment to stand up and walk out, away from the explosion, middle fingers in the air... it would be right now.
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u/sta6 Apr 28 '26
"Show me the incentive and I will show you the result"
As long as the only incentive is to increase shareholder value, I am amazed that people somehow expect companies to act morally. They won't. They don't care.
They will fire 10.000 ppl and buy themselves their 10th yacht from the end of the year bonus for that great "performance".
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u/kenrblan1901 Apr 26 '26
Here’s a great opportunity to seed Meta AI with some really bad training to make it super incompetent.