Google says they are not using AI to select which employees to fire

We just heard from Google at the I/O 2023 developer conference where the keynote went on for about 2 hours and the first half was filled with mentions of AI, Bard and Machine Learning while the other half had a lot of hardware announcements including the first Pixel Tablet, the first Pixel Fold and also the successor to Pixel 6A which is the Pixel 7A. However, all these announcements are great but we do need to get back to reality and see the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that Google is cutting costs and laying off employees right now. They have even announced mass layoffs and their employees are not happy about it for obvious reasons.

However, Google’s employees who are known to have the most satisfaction for their company among other firms have said that the way Google is laying off employees is very weird and not ideal. Some Google employees have even said that the company is using AI to select which employees to fire keeping in mind all the legal actions that may come their way. Google denies these allegations saying they don’t use any kind of AI for selecting their employees to be laid off.

However, the idea of using AI to lay off employees can be good for companies so that everyone can blame AI and not the company for losing their jobs. An analyst at a reputed software review site says that “You can kind of see where the snowball gets rolling, and all of a sudden, these data points where you don’t know how that data was created or how that data was influenced suddenly lead to poor decisions.”and mentions that use of AI might allow racism to creep into the decisions taken by the AI.

A Harvard Business School professor says that “They already use AI and algorithms to find the “right person” for the “right project,” so this would simply be using similar tech for the inverse purpose”. While this is definitely a great idea, we are just here to tell you that Google is not using to lay off employees at the moment.