Microsoftlaid off more than 9000 employees earlier this month. This has resulted in long-gestating games likePerfect DarkandEverwildgetting axed, alongside anunannounced MMO projectfrom the makers ofThe Elder Scrolls Online.
In each individual case, you can point to potential causes for their demise. The Initiative andRarewere arguably taking too long to deliver their games, and both seemed to be struggling through its own troubled development cycle. The ground has shifted for live-service games in recent years and a new offering, even one from a proven MMO developer likeZenimax Online, has no guarantee of success. More broadly,Xboxhas made puzzling decisions in recent years — like going all-in onGame Passat the expense of its hardware — that may have finally come back to bite it.
But a recent report suggests that the layoffs may, in fact, be due toMicrosoft’s big spending on AI. Less that Microsoft plans to immediately replace those employees with AI and more that it is cutting costs across its business to make up for the massive $80 billion investment it has made in AI tech.
This comes from a report on Microsoft’s widespread layoffs that was published atThe Seattle Times. In the article, University of Washington professor Margaret O’Mara, a historian who has written extensively about tech, is quoted suggesting that Microsoft is taking a step toward a future with far fewer human workers. “If AI is the centerpiece of what Microsoft [is] doing," O’Mara says, “then what it needs to buy is GPUs and data centers. It might invest in people, but maybe instead of hiring 10 middle managers, Microsoft is hiring one extremely expensive AI specialist.”
In other words, a corporation isn’t likely to invest heavily in costly AI tech if it doesn’t intend to cut costs in the future, and we just saw how Microsoft plans to do that.
Xbox Specific Investments In AI
While Microsoft is broadly investing in AI, the gaming division is also making Xbox specific investments in the tech. Back in February, Fatima Kardar, Xbox’s corporate vice president of gaming AI, penned anXbox Wire blog post about the company’s investment in Muse, an AI model designed to analyze games and create new gameplay using the data. It isn’t capable of making playable games yet, but Kardar pitches a future where old games can be updated for any hardware using Muse, or that developers could use it to rapidly prototype for future releases.
Those ideas sound nice. And Muse squares with the ‘wow, look what it can do’ pitch that companies have made to consumers and consumers have made to each other since generative AI first made its way into the mainstream in 2022. With the arrival of DALL·E mini and ChatGPT, the technology quickly ingratiated itself into many consumers' daily lives. Endless Wes Anderson andStudio Ghibli parodieshave been generated, andmany students have turned to ChatGPT to write their papers and emails. The pitch is that it’s a magic technology that does your work for you, and during its rise, a lot of people have enjoyed watching the six-toed rabbit emerge from the too-glossy hat.
Though theWriters Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA saw the threat AI posed to creative fields back in 2023, it was easy for many workers to ignore the risk of such a technology. Since then, AI has become omnipresent, integrated into every corner of the internet. Your Google searches are AI, the photos in your Facebook feed are AI, the songs on your Spotify playlist are AI, the lo-fi beats videos you work to are AI. Big tech’s implementation of AI has started to feel like Apple’s decision to remove the headphone jack from the iPhone. Is it better? No. But you still want an iPhone, right?
A Future For All Of Us
The Microsoft layoffs make the cost of that ubiquity clear. AI being everywhere means AI being used in every field. AI being used in every field means workers in every field being replaced by AI (if it’s not taking their jobs, it’s sucking up their salaries).
Not all workers will be replaced, obviously. There are plenty of things AI still can’t do. But as governments and corporations dedicate more and more money to the tech, that list of tasks will narrow. It may not do your job better than you, but that doesn’t matter when enough money has been sunk. Then the question becomes less ambitious: Can it do your jobwell enough?
For many, AI has seemed like a toy or a useful tool. But in reality, it’s the catalyst of the next big labor fight. Technological progress isn’t an inexorable march forward. It’s more like a river with many tributaries. Some of which go on to become mighty rivers in their own right — fire, the wheel, the internet. Others dry up, like LaserDisc, Google Glass, or Hyperloop. Looking back, it’s easy to see tech’s evolution as one unstoppable, natural force, but that’s only because the times it was dammed up are harder to see. Time will tell if gaming-specific AI initiatives like Muse dry up or surge forward.
AI tech has broad, far-reaching applications, which makes it equally easy to vision cast or fearmonger about it. But AI doesn’t have to replace all of our jobs. It doesn’t have to create our games. We, together, create the world we live in. The Microsoft layoffs make it clear that the future tech companies want to create will only serve the needs of the few. As the many, we need to reject it.
