[23567] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Script of my national radio report yesterday on
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lauren Weinstein)
Tue May 12 11:12:06 2026
Date: Tue, 12 May 2026 08:01:38 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
To: privacy-dist@vortex.com
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This is the script of my national network radio tech report yesterday
on the disastrous frenzy of layoffs being conducted by Big Tech, and
how this affects employees, the companies, and all of us. As always
there may have been minor wording variations from this script as I
presented this report live on air.
- - -
You may recall an episode of Rod Serling's original "The Twilight
Zone" called "The Brain Center at Whipple's", an episode he wrote
himself. It first aired almost exactly to the day 62 years ago. It
tells the story of a factory where all the vast numbers of workers are
laid off to be replaced with automated systems, with the twist at the
end being the firm's board of directors kicking out the owner Whipple
himself to be replaced with AI -- the famous "Robby the Robot" first
seen in the 1956 film "Forbidden Planet".
That's a bunch of decades ago, but fast forward to 2026 and we see Big
Tech billionaires taking a similar view of those pesky human
employees. Big Tech today is in a wild, destructive frenzy laying off
hundreds of thousands of highly skilled software engineers and other
employees who made the firms successful. The firms will sometimes (but
not always) claim outright that this is about Large Language Model AI
systems replacing the employees, including often many of the employees
ordered by management to build the AI rather than maintain and expand
the non-AI systems so many people depend upon.
That's typically PART of what's going on. The other part is often a
thinly veiled effort to CRUSH the remaining employees, to replace full
time workers with temp workers or offshore workers with lower pay and
lower or no benefits. Sometimes Big Tech workers are being laid off
and then offered the chance to come back at lower pay. Many observers
feel that layoffs are also used as a weapon to fight efforts of tech
workers to unionize.
There are also other ways that firms attempt to mask their intentions.
They may offer so-called voluntary exit plans and early retirement
packages. Of course, the waves of layoffs will likely follow anyway.
Meanwhile, firms tout claims that large percentages of their software
code are now written by AI, or even that non-technical employees are
using AI to generate production code -- there have already been well
documented instances where this resulted in buggy code that caused all
sorts of problems, even as the firms keep shoving shoddy AI systems
onto users who increasingly don't want to have anything to do with AI
systems at all, for the many reasons we've discussed in the past.
The upshot is that employee morale at many of these firms is
HORRENDOUS and getting worse. Many employees who haven't been laid off
yet are worried that they may be management's next target to be pushed
out the door, which certainly doesn't create a good work environment --
what it does create is a vicious circle of FEAR. In some cases,
management seems to be going out of its way to upset remaining
employees with intrusive activity monitoring and what many employees
view as outright threats to their livelihoods.
For many years now, students were told that they needed to learn how
to code, many schools made software coding a required component of
their curriculums. Students were informed that this was the employment
focus of the future, that they couldn't risk being left behind. Now
that's all in the past. Many firms don't want to hire entry level
software engineers, which begs the question of where senior software
engineers are going to come from, as the quality of the systems we
depend on continues descending into a putrid pile of AI Slop.
Because ultimately, almost all of us are the losers. The users of
these systems, the employees being laid off -- everyone that is except
the private jet and big yachts class at the top ordering the layoffs.
Stock prices may be artificially boosted for now, but when the
inevitable AI market crash comes the wails of despair will be very
loud indeed. More than half a century ago, Rod Serling predicted the
technological future of corporate greed and disrespect toward
employees. Now our own present has proven him to have been all too
correct.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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