As games like Baldur's Gate 3, Alan Wake II, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Spider-Man 2, and so many more marked 2023 as a year of instant hits and commercial success, developers were suffering. Layoffs rolled across the industry worldwide, knocking out a reported 6,500 jobs from studios like Amazon Games, Ubisoft, Epic Games, and Niantic. Roughly one-third of developers were affected either directly or indirectly by job losses in 2023, according to new data released today by organizers of the Game Developers Conference, and the industry impacts will be felt for months to come. Each year, GDC polls attendees about issues facing the industry, from layoffs to generative AI to diversity efforts. For the current survey, they polled 3,000 developers from game studios large and small.

Social media imploded and the BBC practically ate itself last week as the scandal over Huw Edwards allegedly paying for explicit images from an unnamed young person unspooled. But what you knew, and when, depended largely on where you looked. Consume only traditional media – television, radio and newspapers and news websites like the Guardian – and you would not have had much inkling of who was in the frame until Edwards's wife named the BBC News presenter as the one at the centre of the storm. Sniff around social media, however, and you likely knew who was involved days before – and probably also thought a lot less of other names bandied about in connection with the concern. One former member of Twitter's curation team, who asked not to be named, believes the failure on Twitter's part was down to a combination of short-staffing and tech changes since Elon Musk took over.

SoundHound, the company that once said it wanted to challenge Amazon and Google's dominance in the AI voice market, has reportedly cut about half its workforce. According to Gizmodo, the firm laid off about 200 employees last week as part of a company-wide restructuring. If Gizmodo's reporting is accurate, the mass layoffs would mark the second staff reduction SoundHound has undertaken in less than a year. In November, the company reportedly laid off 10 percent of its workforce. Before the first round of cuts, SoundHound employed approximately 450 people.

Uber's firing of thousands more of its employees this week, starting Monday, will bring the number of people it has dismissed from responsibility over the past year to more than 10,000, according to some estimates. Uber's previous round of job cuts saw it remove 3,700 people, or 14% of its total global workforce, in the first week of this month. Sources inside Uber, cited by Business Insider, said surviving employees are bracing for the latest round of mass layoffs, which will definitely run into thousands. Ahead of the layoffs, Uber last week told employees to be fired that they'd received 10 weeks' salary plus paid healthcare until the end of 2020. Employees to be fired this week will come from freight and the self-driving car unit and Advanced Technologies Group.

New AI and robotics technologies are increasingly automating work tasks. How much of a threat does automation pose to workers? A new study by one of us (James Bessen), along with Maarten Goos, Anna Salomons, and Wiljan van den Berge, provides the first large-scale quantitative evidence of how automation affects individual workers, using government data from 2000-2016 for 36,000 firms in the Netherlands, covering about 5 million workers each year. We found that automation does indeed affect many workers. Each year, about 9% of the workers in the sample are employed at firms that make major investments in automation.

Is it as bad as all that? There's a lot of anxiety out there about automation based on AI making professions obsolete. The fears range from noting specific examples, such as automated trucks and truck drivers, to speculation that entire industries will start mass layoffs and replace people with AI tech. The argument is often, "this time, automation is different." That in the past, when machines made work easier, they created more new jobs to offset the loss of old ones.