AI has emboldened CEOs to make all kinds of smug declarations that betray their contempt for lowly human laborers.
But Bill Winters, the CEO of the British multinational bank Standard Chartered, said something so viscerally off-putting that he’s now gone into full damage control mode to get the heat off his back.
On Wednesday, he wrote an internal memo to employees attempting to explain away his remark that he would be firing thousands of workers and replacing the company’s “lower-value human capital” with AI.
Yes, you heard that right: “lower-value human capital.” And it clearly didn’t go over well.
“Many of you will have seen media coverage following the investor event in Hong Kong, particularly the reporting around automation, AI, and workforce changes,” Winters said in the memo, per The Wall Street Journal. “I know this may be unsettling when reduced to simple headlines or a quote out of context.”
“Where roles do fall away, it reflects changes in the work, not the value of our people,” he added, unconvincingly.
The ghoulish remarks came on Tuesday as Winters was in Hong Kong giving a presentation about the London-based bank’s new financial targets. Chief among them was a plan to cull about 15 percent of its workforce by 2030, or about 8,000 jobs.
“It’s not cost cutting,” Winters said. “It’s replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting in.”
Unfortunately for Winters, he would be receiving no kudos for inventing what is perhaps the most strained and misanthropic euphemism — or dysphemism , perhaps — for describing an employee in (lower-value) human (capital) history. Instead, he was met with a storm of outrage online from the very masses he had dismissed as worthless.
“What stage of capitalism is this?” one user dryly asked.
The Financial Times‘s Alphaville blog mocked Winters’ remarks by selling “lower-value human capital” merch to “celebrate your looming obsolescence.”
Even the former president of Singapore weighed in.
“It’s disturbing to read workers described as ‘lower-value human capital’,” Halimah Yacob wrote in a Facebook post, as spotted by the WSJ.
More on AI: New Data Suggests That AI Really Is Already Replacing Human Jobs
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