The Rise of the Machine and Believe in Privacy

And, so, 5% of Meta’s workforce is being made redundant, and the company is targeting low perceived performance — in a similar approach to Twitter’s cull of staff. Many of those who have been laid off identify that time off work was a major factor in the decision. But, in the case of Twitter/X, it came down to metrics related to coding, such as the number of GitHub commits per day or the number of lines of code produced. In the end, Twitter laid off around 80% of their staff [here]:

This is perhaps a different world we are entering, and where “The Machine” is watching us. And who is replacing the redundant staff at Meta? That will be ML engineers, and whose role is possibly to further reduce staff so that the optimal company runs with little staff and makes the maximum amount of profit for the minimum amount of effort. The mighty dollar means more to some companies than a happy workforce. They may not know it, too, but the ML engineers will eventually make themselves redundant. That’s the whole ethos of computer science: make yourself redundant by automating something!

So, watch out for your next performance review; it could come back to bite you. Make sure you know your…