Because according to Reddit and Twitter, CEO = Bad. More than likely people are just knee-jerk reacting to the headline without reading the headline that says 90% of a company’s staff lost their job to a chatbot.

The guy employed 60 people, almost half of which were support staff (26 people, less the 23 that got laid off). I’m assuming this was a text-based support link, so yeah if this guy could get his customers better support (2 min via chatbot vs 2 hours via live person), and the results are satisfactory, I’d do the same thing.

Some people on the internet seem to think that companies are supposed to be job charities, while failing to realize that put in the same position, they’d do the exact same thing.

Edit: Clearly this didn’t go over very well. I’m not trying to say that letting those people go is a win for society, or that I welcome our AI overlords to displace our jobs. My point is that from a business standpoint, if an effective solution saves the company money, any company would be somewhat foolish not to implement it. And truth be told, this is only the beginning of the labor market in the coming years. It would be in everyone’s best interest to develop skills that are much more difficult to be replaced by a computer.