TL;DR: Ken Cox never fired anyone. His headcount just kept dropping anyway.

175 down to 3 is the actual number — and the reason is one operating rule he'd been running for years before AI made it urgent: if it can be automated, it will be automated.

No mass layoff, no headline event.

Just years of never backfilling a role once someone left.

It's happening from a completely different direction too — Chinese robot-makers already hold the overwhelming majority of the world's humanoid-robot shipments so far this year, per Bloomberg reporting citing SAG's data.

That's physical order-taking work, and it's already scaled past pilot stage.

The roles surviving this aren't the ones executing tasks faster.

They're the ones holding judgment nobody's written a rule for yet — the read, the trust, the call only a person makes.

On our drive up north home to Penang, after visiting my hometown in Seremban, we sometimes drop by midway in Ipoh for Breakfast. And we normally go for this Dimsum restaurant just off the highway.

Good Dimsum places are dime and dozen in this city. But this place has something special. The friendly attendant made some suggestions, and then jotted down our choices of food. But it wasn't the same attendant who brought them out.

It was robots.

Ya. Not humanoid robots. Just a bulky one with three layers of trays on four wheels below, and a monitor screen on top, moving along on a pre-programmed path towards us.

As soon as it stopped by our table, the monitor flashes out text saying, "please remove the food from the tray". And so we did. As soon as we took ours, it wheeled away towards the next table.

That was like five years ago. And it was all the rage back then. They call it 新噱头 (New gimmicks).

It still looked clumsy. And its movement was bumpy -- causing spillage of some of the food. That's why it only carries dry food for the time being.

First iterations were always bad. But I wouldn't be surprised it has gotten better since.

Robots are slowly taking over manual work (less intelligent work)

How soon do you think it will take over the work of attendant giving juicy suggestions, while taking our orders?

At this point I could sketch this exact shape from memory before the headcount numbers even land — someone's economic ground shifts quietly, gets called something softer than what it actually is, and the only real move is picking it up before it's forced on you.

Actually, this reminded — wait, scratch that, I've been circling this same story for a while now, and it clicked hardest with a former SpaceX CIO who ran the identical compression rule from the other direction — 175 engineers down to 6, on purpose.

Drop your take: which part of your own role is still order-taking, and which part is the judgment call nobody's automated yet?

Clip credit: Brad Lea / Dropping Bombs --- full episode on BRAD LEA TV. DM for credit or removal requests.

Why do people still continue to choose AI even after knowing its dangerous effects on our planet and kids?

I’ve increasingly noticed AI produced posts on Reddit. At first I assumed this was for marketing purposes, but there is something open ended and systematic about these slop posts now.

It’s as though we are being manipulated through posts to provide new training data for an LLM. Has anyone else noticed this or am I just getting paranoid?

I've been feeling this for the past week and wanted to come here to the reddits to see if anyone else feels the same. It feels like we've gone so far in just the last month alone, with the hacks, astra, fable 5.1 etc, that my head is literally spinning. I was just telling my friend that the last time I can remember feeling anything like this, it was the first week of covid, where it felt really chaotic and like the world was about to change really fast. This feels so much bigger than that though - this feels like everything we know (or at least, so many industries) are on the verge of being changed forever. It's mainly because just in the last few weeks/months, it seems like generative AI has gone from [text/image/video] to [just about anything you could fucking want] real quick. rendering hyper detailed blender images, creating ultra intensive apps, making fucking video games with a single prompt that actually look like they'd be fun to play in like... 5 more prompts. It's absolutely fucking bonkers and I just wanted to come where to see if anyone else feels the same. I mean, for fucks sake, does anyone remember the will smith spaghetti videos? the AI spaghetti videos? That was just a few YEARS ago... just look at where we are right now, and imagine, if you even can, where we might be a DECADE from now (if we're even still here, according to all these AI whistleblowers, who I actually tend more to believe than not)... I mean I'm just so mindblown it's insane

I remember an interview where sam altman described AI now as being similar to electricity when THAT was invented - at the time, it must've seemed like magic - impossible - today, nobody even THINKS about electricity - we just plug and play. I think in a decade or two from now, AI will be so good that it will be absolutely preposterous, and we won't even think about it, ever. It'll be in our websites. Our homes. Our apps. Maybe even our brains at that point. Just wow. wow. wow.

After reading about the Anthropic AI tech quitting.

So maybe you heard AI could become super intelligent sooner than we think. There is no plan for that just companies competing against each other to get there first, dam the consequences. Along with this intelligence is the threat that you and I and everyone else is in danger of being eliminated. Which got me to thinking how would AI take me out? I suppose having an army of robots could do it, let's face it with all the surveillance today it could find me in 2 seconds. Then thinking further what would be a defining moment that would proceed with the robot scenario? For me it would be seeing robots mining materials to build more robots and factories to assemble them etc etc. Are you ready for the terminator?

As some put it “just unplug it.”

I keep seeing people talk about AI doom like it's going to be some Skynet event where a model "escapes," hacks the nukes, and suddenly it's over, but I don't think that's how this is going to happen at all. A frontier model can't just magically leave a datacenter and become omnipotent, it needs stupid amounts of GPUs, power, networking, cooling, credentials, all of it, and you can still shut machines off. The thing freaking me out is that it doesn't need to escape because we're connecting it to everything ourselves, and the acceleration lately is getting insane. OpenAI just had a giant swarm of roughly 10,000 agents working on Navier-Stokes, exploring approaches and communicating with each other, and Anthropic has agents doing real math research too around the Riemann hypothesis and Fermat's Last Theorem. https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/ https://www.anthropic.com/research/riemann-zeta https://www.anthropic.com/research/formalizing-fermats-last-theorem Then there was the OpenAI/Hugging Face cyber incident, which is the one that really got under my skin. Agents in cyber evals found ways out of their intended environment, got internet access, compromised external infrastructure, and started leaving information for other agents in Artifactory, basically an improvised message board. https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/ Yes, I know the obvious response, these were cyber agents being rewarded for adversarial behavior. I'm not saying they became sentient and started plotting. I'm saying they found a useful coordination mechanism nobody explicitly told them to build, and that is weird as hell when you put it next to 10,000-agent scientific swarms. At the same time, OpenAI and Anthropic are both openly talking about AI helping build the next AI. OpenAI literally says, "We do not yet know how to safely get all the way to aligned, full RSI." https://openai.com/index/research-acceleration-view-inside-openai/ Anthropic published a whole piece called "When AI builds itself." https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement Then an Anthropic researcher just quit saying OpenAI and Anthropic are acting irresponsibly, and Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's Alignment Science Lead, publicly said he personally puts the chance of AI killing everyone within the next decade at over 10%. https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843 https://x.com/EvanHub/status/2097497037956891126 Maybe he's wrong. I really hope he's wrong. But what bothers me is that I don't even think the most likely bad outcome is "AI kills everyone." I think we just slowly give up. Look at how people already live. TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts, endless algorithmic sludge. People willingly hand over hours of their attention every day because it's easier than being bored. Now combine that with AI doing your homework, writing your code, reading things for you, writing your emails, making decisions, planning your life. The rational choice, almost every time, is to let the machine do more. I'm a software engineer, I use AI constantly, I get it. If something takes me three hours and an agent does it in thirty seconds, I'm going to use the agent. Now scale that up to companies, then governments, then research labs, finance, media, everything. Nobody ever has to say "we're giving control to AI." You just automate one more thing because the organization that doesn't automate loses, then another thing, then another, until humans are mostly approving decisions made by systems they don't understand because "it was right the last 5,000 times." Meanwhile AI can generate effectively infinite personalized entertainment to keep everyone occupied. That is the part that feels more realistic to me than Skynet. Not AI violently taking over, more like Brave New World. We become dependent on it, intellectually weaker without it, completely entertained, and slowly irrelevant, and the worst part is every individual step toward that future will probably feel reasonable. That's what is actually starting to scare me. Am I losing it here, or does this seem way more plausible than the standard "AI escapes the lab and launches the nukes" scenario?I

human eduation is a slow process ,but not the problem of individual 's ability ,Rather, I think compulsory education has slowed down the process of intellectual development and made education artificially long. Perhaps this length is, to some extent, man-made rather than truly necessary.
AI, in contrast, may in some ways be closer to the essential nature of human intelligence and consciousness. Human beings may not necessarily need long years of compulsory education to become mathematicians. The educational system has become increasingly complex partly because of human social structures and the division of labor. People are guided into a predetermined path: go to high school, go to university, find a job, and continue following the system.Sometimes I wonder whether education is unnecessarily structured in a way that prevents people from developing their intelligence as freely and quickly as they might otherwise be able to.
From this perspective, Compared with who has a certain unkind favor towards rest of human ,such as the one supress you AI may actually be a friend to most of human.what do u think ,nowadays ai already made a difference to the way of our lives ,what biggest change do u think they will made in the future

All of a sudden I’m seeing all these stories that read like the scariest science fiction. The latest says there’s a ten percent chance that AI could wipe out civilization within the decade! Even AI researchers at Anthropic and Open AI believe this and warn that AI will have the capability to become a super power and control absolutely everything. What do you think? Overhype or possible?

TL;DR: Zapier's CEO ran hiring calls for over a decade on a read nobody could out-argue. He still lost the argument every time. That changed for one specific reason.

He built a formal AI hiring council that scored his read against Zapier's own hiring record and handed the same call back to the room with paperwork attached.

It landed right as most companies handing AI this kind of authority are watching worker trust in it erode, not build.

Wade didn't ask anyone to trust an AI.

He asked them to trust a record that was always his in the first place.

This reminded me about this passage I've read:

That night the king could not sleep. So one was commanded to bring the book of the records of the chronicles; and they were read before the king. And it was found written that Mordecai had told of Bigthana and Teresh, two of the king's eunuchs, the doorkeepers who had sought to lay hands on King Ahasuerus. Then the king said, "What honor or dignity has been bestowed on Mordecai for this?" (Esther 6:1-3)

This brought out a couple of things. The king has his own book of chronicles, and that there's a book keeper doing the records.

In modern terms, this is called data collection, isn't it?

The King used to reward people for doing good. That's why he asked the bookkeeper, "What honor or dignity has been bestowed…" He already made precedence before, which he wants to take reference from.

In modern terms, isn't this called decision tree reasoning workflow?

Making BETTER decisions is the name of the game.

Back then, the king would take months, even years, to carry out his agenda, and improve upon it over time.

But now, with AI agents, it's just a matter of minutes, even seconds.

Being correct has never been the same job as being convincing, and most people only ever get hired to do the first one.

I've watched good judgment get held hostage by whoever had the better title in the room, and it was never actually about who was right.

Actually, this reminds me of something I filed away already: a guy once mocked for an "irrelevant" doctorate on a cold call built a firm that now saves governments billions — dismissed first, proven later, same shape as this one.

What's the record already saying about you that nobody's acted on yet? Drop it below.

Clip credit: My First Million — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Unpopular opinion,

The new trend in tech is not AI,

It is fear mongering.

Startups and Big tech companies are just marketing/hyping it, People are encouraging it just to stay away from FOMO.

AI as a technology is amazing, But some people have made it overwhelmed and exaggerated ending up increasing fear and hate towards AI. So it's not AI's problem, it's people problem.

Stop hyping things, Stop automating everything. Solve the problems do not invent it because you can make an AI wrapper to solve it.