IF you’re not paying attention, you should; you really, really should. What is happening in the US — the epicentre of AI transformation — will soon happen everywhere else as well, and the consequences will leave no one untouched. Take, for instance, the latest big story: on May 20, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, began to announce lay-offs. Starting in Singapore, Meta began to lay off 10 per cent of its entire workforce — about 8,000 people. Employees who had until recently thought that their work was bulletproof suddenly found their jobs on the chopping block.

The reasons offered by Meta are instructive, though hardly illuminating. The cause of the lay-offs, it said, was the need to trim its operating costs to be able to afford the new infrastructure that will be required to run its AI processes. This means it may spend billions of dollars in the next few years on building enormous data centres — fuel- and water-guzzling behemoths spread over thousands of acres that will speed up the world’s increasing reliance on AI. The fact, however, is that all the lay-offs combined would only mean a reduction of $1 billion in its budget, which is nothing for a company that says it will spend between $125bn and $145bn on AI in........

© Dawn