AI productivity myth: AI layoffs are destroying productivity | Natasha Bernal

There is a cost to all of this and companies are assuming that that's a cost that they can bear where they're kind of using, they're losing institutional knowledge, they're losing skills left, right and centre. After a layoff, the survivors of the layoff experienced a 41% decline in job satisfaction and a 20% decline in job performance. So the people that you have left are actually disengaged, unhappy and really, really worried about their future. Joining me on the tech report today is the tech journalist Natasha Bernal. Thanks for coming back. Thank you for having me. In a recent Time article, they spoke to some former employees of Oracle who quite literally trained their AI replacements with their specific workflow data that they were recording. And according to a survey in that article of about 200 of these Oracle employees, they found that it seems the company was potentially targeting the older employees leading to some allegations that they were trying to avoid paying out on unvested stocks what do you know about this yeah so um as you might remember um oracle did a big amount of of layoffs um you know earlier this year and yeah there is a feeling certainly with people who are now former employees speaking to Time basically saying you know this has affected us more that you know it's obviously had huge repercussions because a lot of them had bonuses and incentives provided as you say through RSUs which are basically a form of employee compensation where a company agrees with an employee that they're going to give them shares or cash equivalent at specific date and the way it works is that if you're laid off with unvested rsus which is basically you haven't reached that time period that you've agreed with the company to get that money it means that you are likely going to lose the right to receive those company shares in the future and in fact any unvested rsus will be given back to your employer it basically kind of for a lot of people this is used as a big tool as an incentive to keep people on to keep them motivated and it's basically shooting out their legs from underneath that um and so they said that they they were basically um in this survey from time sorry they said that it's 27 respondents reported that they had rsus due to vest within 90 days so really really close to that deadline that had been set by the company um you know a former software manager for example told time that 70 percent of his compensation was tied up in rsus and that he was four months away from a million dollars in stock options vesting which is obviously really really bitter pill to swallow um because you're not just losing your job and your employment and you know it might be very difficult for all the employees to find alternatives but also they're saying that you know that their compensation that they were counting on um through through this this scheme has completely vanished and so um yeah really really sad situation for a lot of people um and yeah i think you know with these sorts of things in the situation that people and I do wonder what will the future be for the RSUs because a lot of people will have in the back of their minds I could be laid off before any of these things come to fruition and you know the more layoffs that occur the more instability and the more uncertainty and the less likely that people will necessarily accept that as as a big part of their compensation packages. It also raises the question of what the people in these particularly the ones in uh ai exposed jobs be that due to automation in some way or cutting jobs for pr reasons to justify expenditure on building ai data centers um the the toll on these employees of essentially quite literally training their their replacements with their information and then surely this isn't a thing limited to oracle and this kind of feeling is probably quite common amongst a lot of employees who are having this exact same concern. Yeah, not at all. It's certainly a widespread issue. With this report from Time, one of the employees was talking about the fact that they were asked to use AI tools that they found that were internal ones for Oracle that they found not very useful for their work and actually really time consuming and not great and not useful, not productive at all. That another person who was senior manager of software development said that the mandates from the company resulted in junior engineers using AI to write a load of faulty code and then senior engineers had to go in and you know fix it the entire time it's just like a complete you know mess of a situation which is very difficult I imagine for the people who are in the thick of it working on these things another person said that while they found Oracle's AI tools to be helpful for her productivity that she actually ended up working harder than ever before. And we've talked about this in this programme, how a lot of the promises that people are given with AI tools is that they're going to free them up, they're going to take away mundane tasks, it's going to be easier to work. And in fact, it's just ended up with people working a lot longer, a lot harder and without actually having the help that they thought they were going to have. They're just, you know, the easiness and the benefits are all towards the company rather than to the individual employee. I think with this situation that we're seeing here and Oracle's scenario is really pointing at a wider trend it's this evolution of people being asked to use AI in their daily work life then being asked to train it or for using or asked to use it to sub in some of the work that they would normally do people find it from useless to finding it that will force them to just increase their workload or not deliver on the promises that they thought they were going to and and we've spoken about the language surrounding the adoption of AI in the workplace. And I feel this is another example of that people assume, you know, AI will free them up, AI will help them. AI is actually helping the employer, the company to not hire more people, to get people to do more for the money that they're being paid. And in fact, if you have a situation such as the one that the senior manager was describing where you have faulty AI products, it could actually generate a lot more work than what you were expecting as you try and fix some of the errors that it's created artificially in the workflow. So, I mean, obviously, this is something that, you know, is a widespread issue, but it's the language barrier that we refer to earlier in this program in previous episodes, where, you know, there is this assumption that, you know, people are silly enough to not understand that if you're training AI to do parts of your job that you don't understand that perhaps that part of your job multiplied by four or five people having that part of their job place could end up being layoffs and that's basically what's occurring. There's one thing that stood out to me which said that easy was essentially a euphemism for doing more work in less time. Yeah. If the survey of the former Oracle employees is accurate and they are targeting or were targeted or how you want to these more senior employees the one thing that strikes me is if you're like you say the junior ones are largely using ai to produce large amounts of large amounts of code and then the senior ones are the ones that are having to check it so if you're then removing that senior quality check step it's not just gutting the workforce you're kind of removing the ability not only to produce good work but to to grow as a company as the people that will be then growing up with the company won't have the abilities to verify the work of the new people coming in after them. Yeah, it's losing skills, isn't it? It's a vicious cycle if you lose more experienced workers. But this is something that has always been thus. You have people will leave or will be let go, and they're replaced with two junior people, or they're replaced with someone that has a lot less experience. And there is a cost to all of this, and companies are assuming that that's a cost that they can bear, where they're kind of using, they're losing institutional knowledge, they're losing skills, left, right and centre. And often there is a huge repercussion. I mean, I think this also speaks to a really, really important trend that has been ever thus again, which is ageism in the workforce. And there are countless examples of how difficult it is for people over a certain age, tends to be around 45 to find other roles if they're laid off or to be considered a contender if they're up against someone younger and when it comes to AI in the in the workforce these stereotypes are even worse you have a situation where if it is true at Oracle that they have specifically targeted older employees I mean Oracle hasn't confirmed that that has been the case at all and if it is the case I haven't seen evidence of that yet that a lot of the people that are affected by these AI generated layoffs of the older generation, then it is a really, really kind of bad worsening of a trend that's already very worrying for everybody. So Generation recently conducted a survey to explore the experience of like mid-Korean older workers in the light of AI adoption in the workplace. They did this big survey of over 2000 employees in the US, France, Ireland, Spain, and the UK, basically looking to see whether they and also around 1,500 hiring managers have perspectives that could kind of shed some light on whether people who are older are going to find it harder to get jobs and keep jobs in this environment. And across the board, it was kind of what was expected to hiring managers prefer younger candidates. So 32 of employers in the US would likely consider candidates over the age of 60 for roles that regularly use AI tools versus 90 who would likely use people under the age of 35 In Europe we looking at less of an impact because the adoption of AI has been less widespread. But 33% of companies were saying that they would likely consider hiring candidates over the age of 55 for roles that use AI tools, while 86% were likely to consider the younger under age 35 group um and so you kind of see this sort of trend of like even though there's so much promotion around ai tools and saying look you can adopt skills really easily um some some of these tools are supposed to be so easy that you don't need additional skills and yet the confidence level of people who have proven time and time again in their careers that they're able to adopt new skills and learn new things is such they go oh no no this is beyond them they can't you know they've learned it all but they can't possibly learn anything to do with ai tools and so it really really disappointing um situation here but you know this bias really does bode ill for older workers in in this environment where it feels like companies are moving further and further towards um you know using ai tools on a daily basis and so you know being able to use these tools is clearly a priority for companies and hiring managers. And, you know, having that bias against older people just makes it that extra bit harder for them to survive in the workforce. So I am interested to see what is going to happen to the older workers that were laid off at Oracle and the ones that have been involved in tech layoffs throughout, because, you know, it's difficult anyway to find a job. And if they're in a situation where the majority of the jobs available are under this criteria, I'm sure it would be very hard indeed. interestingly in china a judge ruled that companies essentially can't lay off employees because of ai washing essentially but but saying your job is no longer there because of ai is just not allowed anymore because i think there's actually two rulings there was one late late last year i think as well i mean while it's unlikely something like that will ever really happen in the west and i think certainly america are there any lessons you think that can be learned from this approach which could actually be applied. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think this is such an interesting case that you're citing. So basically a court in China decided that a tech firm in eastern China had illegally fired one of its workers after he refused to take a 40% pay cut and a demotion when his job was automated by AI. And this was something that happened in an article, well, it became public in an article dated April 28th. And basically, it kind of triggered a decision from the court, which is the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court, saying that the companies cannot unilaterally lay off employees or cut their salaries due to technological progress. And it cites the same case. You know, this ruling comes as like Chinese companies and especially Chinese tech companies race to implement AI and to get the competitive advantage over their Western counterparts. This is hugely state pushed. But the lessons here are very simple for Western companies who are exploring growth at all cost. There is totally a balance in retaining and retraining employees without sacrificing the advancements of AI. And this is an example of it. You know, planners in the Chinese Communist Party have indicated very much that they're willing to prioritise stability in the labour market. They're already facing a slowing economy and a higher youth unemployment rate. And so they're trying to sort of say as a whole, we cannot allow the economy to suffer as a result of AI adoption. I think it's a situation that, you know, hasn't yet manifested itself in the courts, either in the US or in Europe. I think it's only a matter of time. You know, as you say, the US doesn't necessarily have very good or robust labour laws. However, you know, this was a very clear cut situation where he was training AI, then they said, we've now decided that AI will take your job and you're going to take a 40% pay cut and a different job title. And the person said, no, I'm actually taking you to cause. And so I do think that this sort of situation, this seems very clear cut, will manifest itself elsewhere for sure. I think it's interesting the parallels in how firing due to AI is approached in China compared to Oracle, for example. Yeah, for sure. If we skip ahead a few years and tech companies are even leaner, is there a limit to the number of people you think can be removed? thinking sort of about the company morale i'm sure anybody that has worked from home and lived alone at the same time will attest like it can be quite lonely if you're not with other people or seeing other people regularly as part of a team and and i'm imagining in a workplace we have one person per floor and everybody else is ai and the whole payoff is is real gosh are we actually just going to be seeing people just not not having the morale to work anymore that seems so bleak Isaac I'm not gonna lie to you um yeah I mean I would start from saying that I don't think any company that does layoffs is necessarily um in the thought process of caring much about company morale or its other employees um I think you know when companies think about laying off employees they often focus on scale. So they'll think, you know, how many people can we lay off without it being disruptive to the wider organisation? From an employee perspective, though, there's so much evidence that shows that there are ripple effects that come from any layoff that is really important for companies to think about. So repeated layoffs create a really big sense of uncertainty, and employees will react to the realisation that these layoffs may continue indefinitely, which I think is something that is happening within the tech sector. And it compounds over time. So there's evidence that people, you know, stop assuming stability and begin planning exits, that they start to become really disengaged and prioritise looking for another job over long term work. They don't want to take on long term projects. And high performers will simply leave before they feel like they're going to be pushed. So a lot of people are looking for that certainty. And they feel that, you know, in companies where there's regular layoffs or mass layoffs, they're not going to find that. There's a few articles by Harvard Business Review, they have a huge amalgamation of evidence of why layoffs in general are not a very good idea. There was something, it was that companies that shed workers lose the time invested in training them as well as the networks of relationships. So what we were talking about earlier, that wealth of knowledge just goes completely out the window. But there is what they call a blighting effect on survivors so um charlie trevor of the university of wisconsin madison uh was they did this big um research and found that downsizing a workforce by one percent leads to a 31 increase in voluntary turnover in the next year so really really you're looking at the cost of having to you know rehire potentially i mean from one to 31 is a huge huge jump um but you're looking at the cost of having to replace a lot more employees that you did not expect to follow the ones that you pushed out the door and then you've got the morale problem so that weakens the engagement um it causes employees to feel like they've lost control um there was a 2002 study um from stockholm university and university of canterbury that found that after a layoff the survivors of the layoff experienced a 41 decline in job satisfaction a 36 decline percent decline in organizational commitment and a 20% decline in job performance. So the people that you have left are actually disengaged, unhappy and really, really worried about their future. And I feel that a lot of, especially US companies, don't factor that into the management of layoffs and the messaging that they provide internally and externally. Often it's very uncertain as to why some people have been chosen over others, what the rationale is what will happen next and what guarantees any managers can provide that this is not going to happen in the future as often it's quite quick completely out of the blue employees are these days hearing about it just the same as everyone else in headlines and they're just wondering whether the email that they get next in their inbox is going to be from HR asking them to join a company meeting telling them they're laid off that same day so it's really really harsh environment and there is huge psychological impact as a result of that. I was going to say a same day meeting is better than a 6am email at least I suppose. I guess. Yeah it's a low bar, very low bar. The sort of the response, the backlash from employees and the workforce surely is something that we should expect to see happening because I mean in the UK at least Google DeepMind, some of their employees are in talks about unionizing partly over military contracts, but also wanting more certainty around their, basically their jobs in the age of AI. And interestingly, I noted as well that they were, the unionizers in Google DeepMind were being contacted by other AI frontier labs about how they could be helped. And I don't think they went as far to say as help to unionise, but certainly be helped to champion their protection and their workers' rights better. Yeah, I mean, this is something that, you know, it feels very much something new within the tech sphere still in the UK, certainly. And it is a good way to fight back you know collectively You know there is a bargaining power if you are recognised as a union and that basically what um my former colleague Joel Khalili reported yesterday that they were asking for union recognition which was essentially mean that workers would have a place at the table obviously DeepMind was subsumed by Google so how that would actually work if you've got some people that are represented and others that are not that are working for Google corporate it is is going to be very interesting but um you know google's always had as an organization um a lot of contractors as well as salaried staff and a lot of the disparities that we've seen with union work in the us is the fact that the salaried staff are able to um you know negotiate their position a lot more strongly because they're represented and the contractors who who are very vast in number um have not been able to do the same and so um you have a situation where i know that they've been accused previously of sort of preferring contract workers as a result of that situation to try to avoid, allegedly avoid, giving them some of the benefits that a salaried employee would have and so on and so forth. There are certainly some situations that we've seen in the past at Google and the same thing repeats elsewhere more widely. But yeah, it's a good example of employees basically saying we're not happy with the situation. We want certainty. We want some reassurances. we don't feel like we're getting that reassurance so we need to be at the table to hear what you have to say and decide for ourselves whether this is something that we want to carry on with and it does feel like military contracts are um a point of contention um because of the ethics around it and you know people not feeling comfortable about um the direction that that u.s tech companies are taking on that front however it does feel like once you're at that table um you're able to negotiate a lot further and we've seen examples of you know less less on this sort of ai training front and more on the sort of llm language development front of people being laid off already um who have kind of performed the function that companies have have wanted them to do and be like we want you to train this llm to do xyz you've done that already it does it perfectly all right goodbye uh and so we're seeing already waves of that happening and i think this is this this response this unionization is is just people's attempt to try to take back some power in that situation and surely with the less employees there are the more revenue each employee represents and then each individual person then has maybe more bargaining power or maybe can just like you say be contracted in instead of hired i actually i'm not i'm not sure on that front because i think like um the the more the more activity so what seems to happen is that if there's a big layoff or a big controversial contract announced there's a lot of motivation and impetus but the more uncertainties the more layoffs the more targeting that people feel the more insecure they feel about their jobs the more time they spend looking for other jobs the less likely they are to be engaged in that process of improving their current employment status because they have one foot out of the door so I would say that you know there's strength in numbers but i i certainly wouldn't encourage people to start fighting back if they're the only person on the floor as you described i think by that point we're too late i mean if we if we do go back to the the the job cuts but microsoft has gone about things a slightly different way instead of just cutting employees they have essentially offered buyouts which were i think quite specifically aimed at the older employees there with a combination of years worked and personal age equaling, I think it was 70 or something like that. Yeah, that's right. Then meant you could have a buyout. Why do you think tech companies, you'd covered it a bit before, but why do you think tech companies are targeting older workers? Or is it simply just that they're often paid more and maybe have less years to work ahead of them? Yeah, it's a combo of many different reasons. I think this is a really interesting move from Microsoft. it's the first time the company's ever done this um and yes this is in the grand atmosphere of like being you know challenged in the artificial intelligence boom of trying to move forward um and and you know in the in the climate of layoffs and so we're looking at about seven percent of of people who work for microsoft are eligible for this and yes you're right it's years of employment and age adding up to 70 or higher um it was announced in a memo um that will and it will only be available for US employees. It's an interesting move, right? Because it's basically saying you can either be laid off or you can accept this enhanced package deal, right? That seems to be the messaging that kind of surrounds these sorts of announcements. And, you know, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that, you know, it's been hovering around 40% in the 2010s, but the share of Americans over 55 in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, which is the lowest in 20 years. Some of the reasons behind this is sort of the cushion of rising home equity and the stock market returns that a lot of these employees have been able to accrue. But, you know, for some older people and older professionals, especially in tech, money is not the only part of the equation. they also say they don't want to spend the last years of their life or their careers going through the the tumult of AI adoption it's a really interesting trend I've seen a few reports on it where people have kind of said actually you know I've seen it all I don't like what I'm seeing and I don't fancy carrying on and so this is an out for people for those people who might feel that way or those people who are in a financial situation where they feel that they can you know retire comfortably a lot of them might have had equity options that they've been able to cash in a lot of them might be doing this job for the pleasure of it whereas you know I suppose more junior people might not be in that same situation they might not have had such a beneficial benefits package as part of their hiring or anything like that but you know I think assuming that every older worker at Microsoft or any other company has been there for a very long time is a dangerous thing to do uh and it is it is very um i think it's it's voluntary so you know it definitely is within the the the parameters of of what you would expect within labor law in the u.s but it's certainly one of those moves that you know you you would kind of expect people to push back against i suppose in other and other locations where there are more robust labor laws saying that you know what what is the reasoning why you're targeting there doesn't seem to be a lot of um a lot out there about why why are you targeting these people what exactly about this demographic do you think is is important it might be something particular to to microsoft it might be something that you know they're just making some assumptions but either way there's not a lot of info out there as to why exactly these people and what exactly they're using to justify it so um yeah i mean it's It's something that has happened before in other sectors. You know, voluntary redundancy is not an unusual thing to do rather than, you know, trying to do a general redundancy, which is a lot more painful. But yeah, you do wonder about the consequences of that. You know, I feel like people often forget in the melee of work, life, etc., that all of us workers have one thing in common, and that is we will get older. if we're lucky and it's very worrisome I think if you're in a work environment in which you have nobody that is of a certain age or close to retirement age because it does make you question whether you have a future at the business and you know this sort of targeting you know whether it is benevolent or not it is it does lead the question like you know do you have a career at places like this if they're trying to get people out as soon as they possibly can because if you add up people's work life you could have been hired at the age of 21 at these at these um these companies straight out of university if not sooner and you're if you have worked there for let's say 20 years um you're not that old but then you add your age to all of this and you know suddenly you're at 70 it's not like you're a very senior person necessarily out there it doesn't take much to add to 70 if you're adding your age and the amount of time worked and so I think you know it does it does I'd be I'd be careful about the messaging that that sends to to the rest of employees for sure. If we look at the other end of the spectrum as well though you've got graduate jobs which are evaporating and we spoke about it before with Gen Z actively resisting AI rollouts in their workplace. I mean, why are the younger generations entering the workforce, opposing AI, considering younger generations are also usually the ones to first adopt new technologies and embrace it? Yeah, this is the first generation of adults to navigate a world that has been flooded with chatbots and gen AI slop. This is the same generation that spent a couple of years, at least in their homes during the COVID pandemic lockdowns, isolated and dealing with the psychological repercussions of that. They're emerging from the world of academia into the absolute battlefield of a brutal job market in which, you know, graduate jobs are vanishing extremely quickly and the environment is super competitive and all the while you seeing Silicon Valley big AI companies talking about how AI is going to transform everything you know take take over a lot of you know energy sources that is going to you know occupy a lot of space in both our lives and our physical environment all these things are conflating for a generation of people that are entering the workforce now and I really do feel for them it's really really difficult and and yeah they're in a situation where they are leading workforce opposition to gen AI especially and and AI tools because is one of those situations where they have a pushback a psychological pushback you know it's been it's been documented quite well in a lot of the reports out there you know from the New York Times from Vice etc just talking about how a lot of a lot of people just decided I don't want to use AI tools my friends don't want to use AI tools we're concerned that you know if the more that we use them the worse things are going to be for us in general and it's very difficult to argue against that when you have the backdrop of all these layoffs um it's it's it's a whole generational divide i think um and employers do need to address this and they need to do do better at doing that i think how do you think employees or people that are wanting to come into the workforce or people looking for late career change or all these sorts of things that will be feeling considering everything spoken about and also in particular the comments from the nvidia vp who basically just said in his work that ai is more expensive than a person anyway so and i saw another report today that maybe the answer to to bad like bad ai output is to hire somebody that knows what they're talking about it's like how how yeah how how do you think people like this will be feeling seeing this news honestly i think it's a very bittersweet situation right um you know on the one hand you feel vindicated because you know that the skills and the the the your ability is being proven time and time again when you see all of these all these flaws right all these ai flaws but it's a bittersweet situation because for a lot of people it will be very difficult to find a job in this in this climate and it's you know i i feel for them whether they're on the um beginning of their career or whether they're in the sort of mid to senior level, whether they might be finding it very hard. I think the lessons that everyone can learn from this situation is, you know, if you're in a situation where you are replaceable by AI or you have been, you know, unfortunately caught in the crosshairs of AI, to find companies that are a bit more mature about things. I think that this is something that is not rocket science, but it's something that employers could do a lot better. Right. You know, they need to remember that although tech is really great, you know, human decency, having some soft skills, compassion, understanding is not something that AI is able to provide. and it's up to employers to change the narrative and convince workers that may have been laid off or affected by AI or in fact be just so angry and fed up at being told to use very deeply flawed AI tools that aren't actually helping them that they need to just change that narrative and convince them that you know they can that these AI tools will help them achieve some form of work-life balance and I think you know that that's that's the big difference it feels like the um the narrative is very clear from from a lot of firms especially US firms saying like this is our priority our priority is AI and I think for those who have been laid off for those who are starting in their career they need to find places where their priority is you know doing better for their employees and you know creating exciting things and good things that actually work you know whether it's an AI or other other stuff and and just jumping on that bandwagon and going for that rather than trying to you know jump from place to place where the same thing will play out and the same kind of short-sighted decisions of big layoffs due to bottom lines will occur again and again because this is what seems to be happening a lot of US tech workers who were laid off a couple of years ago are in the same rounds that are being laid off now and I think the great thing about that is the great thing about that if there is such a thing that's great about mass layoffs is that everyone seems to be in the same boat there's absolutely no shame whatsoever any longer about being you know laid off under those circumstances or any others and and it's totally understandable and I think you know that there is solidarity in in numbers right you know you're in a big cohort of people I would say if you are one of those affected you're in a big cohort of people in the same boat and you know this is hopefully the economic trends the tides will come back and there'll be a good era of hiring again and things can go a bit back to normal but it's just a bit mad at the moment so just hang tight that would be my advice. Just finally I saw an interesting suggestion from a I think it was a Welsh AI executive who put forward a yeah an interesting idea which was to essentially stripping a lot of nuance out of this but essentially pay robots minimum wage or something along those lines and i just wanted to get your your thoughts on that because it sounds kind of silly but i gave it some thought and if i don't know there was some way of charging a company a reduced fee for how much how per job that they've automated out then that would go some way to making feel a little making people feel a little bit less worried should they get get laid off that maybe there's this fund that they can lean on for an extended period of time because we're again we're all one person per floor in a skyscraper at this point yeah i think it's really it was really interesting to read that because i think it was kind of i read some the bbc report on it and it was kind of a bit confusing because at one point it was sort of the talk of the minimum wage for um for an ai powered robot which sounds ridiculous right who you're just gonna what pay the robot i don't really understand but i think that the overarching argument is one that is really really interesting which is the idea of essentially taxing companies and being like okay if you believe that x percent of your workforce could be replaced by ai you have to you know pay for that so there'll be a tax of some sort levied against these companies um so that they think again and they go actually could we actually get a human to do this instead and it might become more cost effective to do that obviously if it depends on what that minimum wage would be um i'm not entirely sure who would collect that tax or how that would work necessarily um but but it is really thinking bigger picture about like what exactly happens if you are replacing people with something that is not actually economically valuable to I'm talking about our actual literal economy like you know AIs will not spend in shops they will not accrue taxes they will not do anything that's actually useful to society unlike human beings and certainly workers and so it's like what can we do to replace that and make it less attractive for companies to to just deploy willy-nilly AI as much as they possibly can. I mean, I'm not sure whether that would necessarily work. I do think that, you know, certainly it feels like something that's looming, that's been looming for a long time. Europe has been, you know, slower to, you know, use such huge tactics as the US in terms of AI adoption and layoffs and the impact of the job market. However, it is gathering pace and it's something that will become a problem very very soon and I think the only thing that is protecting certainly European workers is in places such as Germany there's a lot more protections against layoffs and so a lot of companies may avoid hiring there because they don't want to have to deal with that but certainly it feels that there are there's more grounds to stand against it than than than there are elsewhere I would be really interested to see what will actually actively happen from the government regarding this issue because you know there was a spokesperson from the treasury was cited by the bbc saying that was committed to helping working people benefit from ai don't know what that means and was setting up a new ai economics institute to monitor impacts and ensuring that we can act quickly as the economy changes now in my experience and i'm not sure tell me if you disagree isaac but it takes a long time to set things up we've got a very good track record of setting things up like two years after the fact so I think you know that there's certainly some some warning bells sounding I think you know people are not paying attention to what's happening in the US are being very silly indeed and so I would be interested in what might happen if if certain ideas of how to curtail the impact on the economy should take place you know I think that would be really really interesting and I think it would clash against a lot of what we've heard from the Labour government so far saying that they want to you know be the place that ai is is going to and that there's so much growth and all that sort of stuff but also we don't want the economy to completely collapse and everyone to lose their jobs and for it to be a disaster so it's a balance isn't it it's a balance and i'm intrigued to see who comes up with a solution that is actually viable that we could try out um as as an economy because yeah i think something will need to happen if if the layoffs become global and gather pace. Well, Natasha Bernow, thanks for taking the time. Thank you for having me. If you enjoyed today's episode and you want to hear more of The Tech Report, please consider liking and subscribing. Also, you can get episodes of The Tech Report wherever you get your podcasts.