And why wouldn't they want to eliminate employees? That's their wet dream! Many business leaders don't see employees as their asset. To them, employees are a necessary evil. If anything, the employer-employee relationship is inherently adversarial. The idea that C-level execs could one day simply talk to an AI and, boom, there's a business with cash flow and no employees, is too attractive for them to pass up, even if the chance is high it doesn't work out. At a personal level, these people have already made their money and are merely there to make more of it. What happens when AI doesn't work out for them and they still need employees? Either they get a pay raise anyway or they get let go and keep their mansions. If they erroneously let a bunch of employees go, then great, they can replace those roles with cheaper workers overseas working remotely. If AI itself can't take the blame for domestic workers losing their jobs, then they can point the finger at Anthropic and OpenAI. Modern workplace hierarchy depends highly on the diffusion of blame, and AI fits into that paradigm by introducing an entirely new dimension to that blame diffusion.
The Holy Grail is a business that exists without costs, employees, property, equipment, products, or even a physical location--just a virtual blob that increases a share price forever. That's ultimately the (in reality unachievable) goal end-state everyone is trying to at least approach.
If AI reduces white collar jobs, how can that be bad when automation reducing blue collar jobs is good? It's like suddenly engineers embrace Marxism.
These argument aren't attacks because one of the basic tenets of free market capitalism is that everyone being greedy for himself is good for everybody. So people saying that corporations care only about profit and not about higher values only reaffirm that basic tenet.
You could try to convince them that they are wrong in their desire to make corporations care about more than money but you cannot blame them for saying something that fully agrees with free market orthodoxy.
> the same arguments hold about management and investors... reducing domestic employment in manufacturing without regard to employees and communities. > If AI reduces white collar jobs, how can that be bad when automation reducing blue collar jobs is good?
First, automaton wasn't the reason for the reduction of US manufacturing, outsourcing was. Wall Street used every leverage to push manufacturing and engineering abroad and that included outsourcing software work. At that time, both workers and engineers criticized the process, so you're factually wrong about that, twice.
Second, their criticism was right because... oh look, we have to bring it all back now, at a great expense paid for... by those same workers and engineers. Because after the big corporations got rich in China they want to come back here and own absolutely everything, including the government and continue the process of disfranchisement of the public by using AI not for higher output but as a cost and workforce reduction tool.
> It's like suddenly engineers embrace Marxism.
This topic has nothing to do with Marxism, which you appear to be using as a smear word, purely mechanically, without any understanding. Marxism has bigger problems but let's not get sidetracked here.
It's like an (emotional) depression or something. Scarcity thinking, the inability to think expansively. People are so sure that everything around them is shrinking that they feel an instinct to hunker down, shrink, and cut as well. Like it doesn't occur to them that they don't have to feel that way. The execs I work with, none of them strike me as spreadsheet-driven greedy people. They seem more freaked out than that.
I don't think it's irrational.
Plus the incredibly optimistic valuations they are talking up for the big AI company IPOs. If they didn't think we were nearing the top of the bubble, they wouldn't all be planning their IPOs at the same time. It's a race to see who can cash out first before it pops.
It feels similar to 2007-2008. People were talking about a bubble. But nobody wants to jump off the train too early and lose out on the big profits just before the end.
I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment.
And whose fault is that? When employers create "fun" workplaces, value optics over excellence, disempower management, and maintain the status quo by the diffusion of blame, what sort of employees should they expect to have? I argue that it is not the fault of lazy workers but employers who encourage and tolerate lazy workers who are getting away blame-free. But the message is that it's always the fault of peons rather than the higher rungs of the hierarchy.
Instead of finding ways to make AI enhance their employees and make them more productive, they immediately jump to ways to eliminate employees. It's the opposite of a growth mentallity.
I'd love for these executives to show me a time when investing in people was the wrong choice. I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment. This suicidal tendency in the corporate world to constantly decimate your workforce every cycle is just mind boggling and the fact the stock market responds to it so positively is horrifying.