Greed
This. It’s not a plan, it’s an excuse.
AI is just the next excuse, and there will always be a next excuse.
The economy isn‘t doing great and the overly rich are greedy fucks.
Because they want at least some of our work to get done while we starve and fight over scraps and eventually die in poverty, conflicts, riots and violence while they hide in their bunkers and build wealthy, gated, libertarian tech-utopia fortresses where the survivors they deem “worthy” might seek refuge if they are willing to bend their knee and pledge fealty to their new tech-gods. When all is said and done, they expect to emerge from their bunkers and rule with an iron fist over the much diminished remnants of humanity, thereby having solved our sustainability problem by letting most of us get killed off, and they can then instruct their totally-dependent disciples to rebuild the world in their utopian image.
This sounds like insane science fiction plot, but you have to understand these guys have read way too much science fiction and misunderstood most of it, and they believe they have the means to turn it into science reality, and I can’t predict whether they’re going to succeed but I can see the writing on the wall clearly telling me that they’re absolutely going to fucking try. And if we all die in the process (even including them) I’m not too sure they even care that much or are capable of thinking of those sort of consequences. These are not deeply thoughtful people, they think they are, and want us to believe they are, but they’re not.
I don’t even knowing if calling them "lagging’ is a good characterization. From my observation they’re simply incapable.
Coz adding AI to your company makes the stock ridiculously explode (see that shoe company that turned “AI”).
It’s slow and hard to fire low performers case by case.
It’s quick and easy to fire large swaths of allegedly low performers under the guise of a layoff.
You can always quickly rehire any layoff mistakes, and Wall Street is rewarding layoffs these days if it’s for AI.
Because if one human managing 5 AI agents gets 120% work output, then you either can scale up and produce more widgets or scale down and save costs on workforce.
Want to know another easy way to save costs on the workforce? We’ve all known this option since 2020. You close your brick and mortar office and let people work from home.
Except for the slight problem that those 5 AI agents cost the same as 3 people so you could have skipped the agents, just hired 3 people and gotten 400% output instead of 120%. Yeah it takes longer to scale up and down, but exactly how volatile is your industry that demand is fluctuating that much month to month?
The world is going through population decline. We aren’t going to have the people to do the work.
