In this case it's more like it's replacing management or executives. There is still a person, with an ownership stake, putting up the capital, and taking the profits (if any).

Until the robots get good enough and cheap enough but then hopefully capitalism balances the market. After all, if everyone is out of work then either we have communism or companies cannot sell anything.

> Apparently, the AI needed to hire humans to carry out the actual work. So AI can replace capitalists but not workers. Maybe the future isn't so dark after all.

No, it's still dark. This is very similar to the initial stages of the capitalist dystopia in Manna (https://marshallbrain.com/manna), which seems to be the Torment Nexus SV is excited about building.

AI will never replace capitalists, because they're the only people allowed to have abundance without work. And don't you DARE to even THINK to question the absolutely SACRED status of private property (peace be upon it). There is no alternative. Get back to work, you slacker.

This fantasy of AI replacing C-suites, CEOs or whatever is very symptomatic of naive tech-folk outlook, completely blind towards sociological and political reality.

I'm not as optimistic as you are that AI automating only high-value employment paths is a good thing. It swings the power balance even further towards capital and away from labor.

But then capital can't pretend that it's doing anything. It spends all of its time now acting like ownership is a job rather than a title in order to justify itself. If a machine can manage, then it makes it more obvious that they are simply royals, ruling by self-decree.

Royals needed gods to justify themselves; when gods die or are switched out, royals are deleted or deposed.

I'm looking forward to the "coordination problem" being debunked. It's always been a demand that economic problems must be impossible to solve centrally, rather than a proof (a demand that justifies 2/5 of the economy going to the financial industry to produce nothing but coordination.) I actually thought that the success of algorithmic trading was enough to do it.

I think that's the point. The research lab is trying to measure where the human sits in the loop in an automated retail store. AI can do the scheduling, hiring, product procurement, supplier outreach, etc. But it can't be the one to clean and place the items on the shelves... As long as humans are still the bottleneck, maybe we'll have some negotiation power..?

> As long as humans are still the bottleneck, maybe we'll have some negotiation power..?

What power will YOU have when you apply for a cleaning job at an automated store and you are competing against all the hundreds if not thousands of former white collars who got AI laid off?