 | TL;DR: Ken Cox never fired anyone. His headcount just kept dropping anyway.
175 down to 3 is the actual number — and the reason is one operating rule he'd been running for years before AI made it urgent: if it can be automated, it will be automated. No mass layoff, no headline event. Just years of never backfilling a role once someone left.
It's happening from a completely different direction too — Chinese robot-makers already hold the overwhelming majority of the world's humanoid-robot shipments so far this year, per Bloomberg reporting citing SAG's data. That's physical order-taking work, and it's already scaled past pilot stage.
The roles surviving this aren't the ones executing tasks faster. They're the ones holding judgment nobody's written a rule for yet — the read, the trust, the call only a person makes.
On our drive up north home to Penang, after visiting my hometown in Seremban, we sometimes drop by midway in Ipoh for Breakfast. And we normally go for this Dimsum restaurant just off the highway. Good Dimsum places are dime and dozen in this city. But this place has something special. The friendly attendant made some suggestions, and then jotted down our choices of food. But it wasn't the same attendant who brought them out. It was robots. Ya. Not humanoid robots. Just a bulky one with three layers of trays on four wheels below, and a monitor screen on top, moving along on a pre-programmed path towards us. As soon as it stopped by our table, the monitor flashes out text saying, "please remove the food from the tray". And so we did. As soon as we took ours, it wheeled away towards the next table. That was like five years ago. And it was all the rage back then. They call it 新噱头 (New gimmicks). It still looked clumsy. And its movement was bumpy -- causing spillage of some of the food. That's why it only carries dry food for the time being. First iterations were always bad. But I wouldn't be surprised it has gotten better since. Robots are slowly taking over manual work (less intelligent work) How soon do you think it will take over the work of attendant giving juicy suggestions, while taking our orders? _________________________ At this point I could sketch this exact shape from memory before the headcount numbers even land — someone's economic ground shifts quietly, gets called something softer than what it actually is, and the only real move is picking it up before it's forced on you.
Actually, this reminded — wait, scratch that, I've been circling this same story for a while now, and it clicked hardest with a former SpaceX CIO who ran the identical compression rule from the other direction — 175 engineers down to 6, on purpose.
Drop your take: which part of your own role is still order-taking, and which part is the judgment call nobody's automated yet?
Clip credit: Brad Lea / Dropping Bombs --- full episode on BRAD LEA TV. DM for credit or removal requests.
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Predictive technology: computational social science
