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A comment on IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI News. Parent comment

Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by sidewndr46 on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @01:35PM (#35791247)
Sure, those 24 consecutive quarters of revenue decline under Rometty is an obvious indication of cutting edge. Cutting edge research on how to turn investors money into into option traders profits.
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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by abakker on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @01:51PM (#35791523)
I'd point out at that Ginni Rometty was a bad CEO, but that doesn't mean that people there didn't do good research. Like, they're pretty unrelated. Research and Development is notoriously hard to commercialize. Over here in HN land, we just say that product market fit is poor or that products didn't get traction, but those are just as akin to R&D as anything.

A better model was that Rometty was not good at choosing what to fund and which bets to make. kinda a failed VC fund.

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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by sidewndr46 on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @01:56PM (#35791604)
What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized? To me, that is just good research followed by bad development. No one investing in IBM is expecting it to be a public works project.

Lookup the saga of HP's memristor followed by "The Machine" for a similar story.

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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by TedDoesntTalk on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @02:31PM (#35792138)
> What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized?

Then I guess we can throw out Xerox Parc's NLS because they never commercialized "windows, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor." They were commercialized by others later on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

We can also throw out most psych, social science, archeology, and history R&D, too.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by willcipriano on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @02:58PM (#35792484)
> We can also throw out most psych, social science

Yes.

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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by anthk on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @04:36PM (#35793832)
First at all, they had to be called 'sciences'. They aren't.
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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by pinewurst on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @03:44PM (#35793089)
NLS came from SRI not Xerox PARC. NLS was in fact commercialized and sold by Tymshare.
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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by smcin on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @05:14PM (#35794304)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_(computer_system)

Fun fact: funded by ARPA

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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by fallingknife on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @05:52PM (#35794738)
Would love to know what the last major breakthrough in social science / psych R&D was.

Archeology / history, on the other hand, definitely have some pretty awesome finds.

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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by abakker on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @10:41PM (#35797109)
Maybe UBI? I mean, hard to say it's been tested enough, but that feels like an answer to this question.
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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by dralley on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @06:44PM (#35795195)
Also 2000 years of Mathematicians talking about Prime Numbers before someone came up with the idea of cryptography using prime numbers.

And the laser, which took a few decades to find an application.

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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by 6510 on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @05:47PM (#35794678)
> What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized?

It attracts playful wizards. If you get enough of those no amount of zombies can beat them.

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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by pixl97 on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @01:53PM (#35791549)
Income and cutting edge technology are at best orthogonal to each other. Now I'm not saying that IBM has cutting edge technology, I'm just saying that a ponzi scheme that profits 24 months in a row is cutting edge under your definition.
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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by propogandist on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @08:45AM (#35801731)
her role crashing the company into the ground is completely omitted in her book, which has been popping up on my linkedin feed. Her gender and former title is clearly more important than what she accomplished, much like Marrisa Mayer.
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