Reminds me of the old joke "90% of the code is 90% of the work. The last 10% of the code is the other 90% of the work."
I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing".
There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported.
I liken it to having children. Conceiving them is fun. Delivering them is painful. Raising them, is a lifetime of work.
In my experience, the same type of thing applies to products that we ship (and charge money for).
I skimmed the article, guilty, but I think what I got from it is that CEOs will CEO? No disrespect meant, I’ve seen your name here often and thoroughly enjoy the folklore that you share, but I don’t understand what context you reacted to. Cheers.
Fully agree. Shipping a complete product with a functioning user acquisition funnel is much harder. It's like; you have to build the whole product first with lots of features and then you have to try to create a highly condensed overview of all those features to expose them all on the landing page.
If you can't make the visitor understand your entire complex product in 10 seconds, then you've lost them.
Your product has to be complex because that's where the software market is at. All of the low-hanging fruits have been taken by the time you identify them. Sure, someone will find a way to make money using new low-hanging fruits that arise due to technological changes but it's not going to be you. You probably don't have the business connections to make that work.
I like this analogy; raising children well like delivering products well pays dividends. They’re less likely to cause problems and if they do, they tend to be smaller in scope.
You can actually get high-quality code out of them -- at least with Claude; not had a great experience with Gemini -- but for complex tasks requires riding them very, very hard and really understanding where things can go wrong and poking at them repeatedly. Iterate, iterate, iterate.
Yup. In another post, I was grumping about having to accept a truly obese bunch of code from an LLM. This particular issue is the only one I could imagine even considering accepting that much pasta, but I sort of have to, because the LLM was able to quickly solve a problem that would have taken me a couple more weeks to address.
I remember a .sig that went something along the lines of:
I hate code, and want as little as possible in my software.
now it's closer to 95% of work can be done by AI and requires 5% mental effort, but 5% of the work requires 95% of the mental effort to finish because of all the unoptimial decisions AI has taken. I find that AI works best in small micro-service type architecture where each component has a clear goal and doesn't have interconnected parts within the same application that can break. But you do run into an issue where changes in microservice a need changes in microservice b and updating it is not ideal since it usually cascades thru the entire system or requires stacks of legacy support.
IME it’s possible to have good clear APIs, limited scopes/goals, etc in a normal (macro?) service. But it requires a level of discipline and process many teams are unwilling to engage in.
There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well.
It's not difficult at all to become one, and the work involved in being a CEO is not particularly difficult in comparison to senior technical work at all. The only thing that is harder about being a CEO is the responsibility. I'm sure being the CEO of Microsoft or whatever is plenty difficult and demanding in many ways, but most CEOs are not that, and speaking just from experience most CEOs and CTOs are clueless morons.
With that said, I've been programming for 25 years and I've only been a CEO for 3, so take what I said with a pinch of salt.
I do think people overestimate titles like this a lot, though, and it really comes down to what the company actually does and what is demanding for that company at that position/role. The CTO of a some-bullshit-as-a-service company may as well be straight out of college, because they're likely doing something trivial that literally anyone (including LLMs) could put together. The CTO of a well-used and reliable streaming service that handles a meaningful part of the world's Internet traffic is obviously solving a more interesting problem.
CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place.
I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives want to ruin the company, they’re just incompetent and therefore make terrible decisions constantly.
I'm very sympathetic to cooperatives, have traveled/know the Mondragon people (largest coop federation), etc.
However, I think there's a reason why coops seem to succeed at smaller scales, but there are essentially no large innovative coops.
There are a few large boring coops, and some small innovative ones, but seemingly something is making the CEO/investor board model the one large innovative companies are all using.
I suspect that it's both (1) access to capital is far harder for coops, and (2) that workplace democracy and hardcore mission focus aren't fully compatible. That is, "you cannot serve two masters" without losing focus on one of them.
If a company accumulates capital, it becomes vulnerable to the principal agent problem, and coops are way more vulnerable here than centralized companies.
If a company doesn't accumulate capital, it doesn't scale in complexity. It can grow by having more people do more of the same things, but it can't move into markets that demand anything complex.
The problem is that knowing the right people to get investment does seem to have utility coops struggle to get, I think? maybe CEOs are basically like producers on movies who are just there to network for you.
In software I can imagine a worker-owned consultancy, but not a product company. It would imply staying in one place working on one product for your whole life, which doesn't sound inspiring
A company need not be a single product, and working in a worker-owned cooperative need not be a lifetime commitment to a single firm (though cooperatives ideally will have less turnover than firms owned by capital separated from labor.)
Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers.
If this sounds crazy the C suite + board already vote on who gets hired into the executive team, vote for the direction of the company, and vote for their compensation packages (hint, they never decrease them).
Why shouldn't workers be legally enabled to do the same? What is the justification to this? I'm curious to hear it because the only way people can justify the current system is declaring that some people are actually more deserving of prestige, money, and benefits while others deserve to suffer.
With income inequality increasing, healthcare outcomes worsening, and children literally becoming stupider isn't it time to question the current system and ask ourselves if this is the society we truly want?
Worker owned cooperatives have a variety of ways of doing this. Voting directly, electing people, etc. The main difference is that the cooperative typically doesn't buy the myth that the person making the high level decision needs to be paid 1000x the workers.
Maybe, but not necessarily for this reason. Even in a worker-owned coop, someone sets the overall direction. And how is that person going to be selected? It's still going to be largely politics.
on the contrary, it seems to be one of the few jobs that seems to require absolutely no qualifications to have.
What you need to do to be CEO is.... convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them.
I've worked under some absolutely awful people who wouldn't pass an interview anywhere, but somehow they're CEOs, because they can smarm there way into more money consistently.
>convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them
And it should be noted that many of these people lending money are in a similar situation of not being required to have any qualifications. Sure, some of them have worked their way up through sound investment after sound investment, but many of them were either born into their position or simply got lucky at some point along the way. Just think of all the money investors threw away pursuing crypto and NFTs for example. Many of those investments were transparently stupid from day 1.
Often, they are good at taking things, keeping things, misdirecting and setting boundaries (especially communication boundaries). They are good at keeping their positions.
This is a broad range of skills and to actually be a CEO, you need to really hone these skills and be among the very top. To be good at those, just enough to qualify for a modest CEO role at a small start-up, you generally don't have the time to be good at anything else.
Saying that you don't need any skills is mischaracterizing it. You don't need any value-creating skills, yes, but you need significant value-capturing skills.
I can imagine a world were all companies become empty of workers and only executives remain and they would just have meetings with each other while they starve and would explain it away as a new diet they're on. There would be no petrol and they would be forced to walk to work and would say that it's their new fitness routine... And they would all believe each other.
He's the face of bad CEOs because people like to make up things about how bad he is. The Social Network, a major 2010 biopic about the early days of Facebook, famously cut his college sweetheart and now-wife out of the story in favor of a fabricated character arc involving an ex-girlfriend who does not exist.
Poor Marky Z. always getting a bad rap. Let s/he who hasn't made zillons getting billions of people hopelessly addicted to social media while facilitating a genocide or two and generally destroying the world order as we know it throw the first stone.
it's kind of like saying like you could replace a king with an AI. the position is a relationship to power more than it is a function with a productive output.
a bad king and a bad CEO could be replaced with a spinning top with no loss in productivity (and maybe some gain).
I still remember when I used ChatGPT the first time to write an email. I thought to myself “Oh. This sounds like 99% of the corporate communication from above”. We were joking that corporate had BossGPT for years and just didn’t tell anybody.
It also made me realize that most the so called “creatives” in marketing and PR also just repeat variations of the same few templates. Not much real creativity there.
Who takes responsibility when the AI does something unethical or illegal? Do we put the computer in jail? Or do we just look the other way like we do with human CEOs?
I think Grok on x.com is a reasonable case study. There’s the stuff we heard about and then there’s a separate category of things that weren’t newsworthy, and only the newsworthy things prompted changes to be made.
Weirdly enough, I'd take the robot. At least we can pretend the robot doesn't know any better. The human is actively choosing to be a dick and profiting off it.
The flesh sack is choosing to be an insufferable twat, and the robot either doesn't have any choice or has a decent statistical justification for what it does.
>> Yes, the tools are powerful, but a CEO who thinks they replace the work of employees is simply a bad CEO.
This is a broad generalization of employees. There will be some "routine tasks" that can be done by AI, now that is a lot more powerful.
There won't be as many employees needed for routine work - for example L1 and L2 support work. For example, many companies had ML engineers building models for various models. Companies can get that off the shelf from AI companies. They don't need a big team of model builders now.
If L2 support work is the example then I doubt we’re near replacement.
L2 issues are already involved in some way often revealing some kind of system failure, requiring context and exploration to understand, and judgement (and perhaps even system overrides) to fix.
I could see “automated L2 is the new L1” improvements, but without a big capability jump and/or a resource bonfire, I don’t think even frontier models would effectively replace good L2 staff.
They might magnify good L2 staff so fewer are needed (and maybe even help L1 staff become L2).
I often use AI chatbot to generate step-by-step instruction for setting or repairing up some bit of tech. It's incredibly empowering, and saved me a a lot of money that would have been spent on buying replacement tech.
You know who can't do that? People who call L1 support.
The message isn't subtle, and isn't meant to be: "we don't care how, but we expect you to stick your nose into AI tools and find some way to fit them into your workflow".
Which indicates: the management believes there are productivity gains from AI use, but adoption lags due to inertia and reluctance to change existing workflows.
> Which indicates: the management believes there are productivity gains from AI use, but adoption lags due to inertia and reluctance to change existing workflows.
Methinks adoption lags due to management's inability to align incentives such that productivity gains are rewarded.
more of "we whined and cried and screamed that we needed new budget in order to buy these tools or we would literally die. now we have them, they don't work as well as we hoped, they aren't leading to productivity gains, and they're actively alienating our workforce and users alike. we're so screwed we literally have no idea how to do reverse this."
This is a great article, and I agree with most of it.
The problem is that the wrong eyes are seeing it.
We need these kinds of articles to be published in places that executives read, and tailored to their audience.
AI recovery is going to be a big wave of consulting over the next several years, maybe very publicly or maybe quietly, but it's going to be a thing. That doesn't mean "all AI is bad" or any other such nonsense, it means that there are a lot of companies out there right now that are doing it wrong and will need help.
The executives that get ahead of this are going to be the winners.
CEOs are probably the most replaceable position, period, by human or AI. Everyone just gives them information. They don't know any information themselves.
Problem is, a CEO can fire employees, find out it was a dumb decision, then leave with a million dollar severance package. So they don't really care when they're wrong.
Ideally contractors that benefit you personally (eg: your buddy who now owes you one), but definitely contractors that let you outsource the responsibility.
Even better if you get some management consultant to suggest the idea and/or do the subcontracting.
Definitely buys you a few quarters of bonus and some time to land your next gig.
A story from today - I needed a small utility to remap my logitech buttons under windows without installing their horrendous GHUB. Logitech Onboard Memory Manager still required ghub to be put into onboard mode.
The solution - linux has utility called piper. I downloaded the repo and just told codex - figure out what piper is doing and create me a small utility to do it under windows. So the jolly critter started experimenting with hex commands, then pulled some other repo on which piper depended figured out how to enable said onboard mode and 10-sh minutes later I had small python script that did what i needed to do.
That would have taken probably half a day of work for a human.
There are many stupid CEO and organizations which are not committed to quality. And a lot of employees that are too set in their ways. But the instinct that underinvesting in AI is more dangerous than overinvesting is right. Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't
"To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer" - this is from the 60, but right now is turned into overdrive.
Similar to Tesla naming it's driver assistant "auto-pilot" in 2015 and your average Joe thought he would be able to sleep while the car would drive him to work.
The CEO just hear AI and think of AGI. They expect Skynet.
Aircraft autopilot is over 100 years old, and Testla autopilot is an automotive version that fits the definition by analogy to what aircaft autopilot does and what the human metaphor means (doing simple tasks aithout higher-level cognition or handling of surprising stimuli). Autopilot is not end-to-end driverless.
The point isn’t whether the aviation term "autopilot" has a technically defensible meaning, but that "Autopilot" predictably made normal people think "the car drives itself", just like "AI" now makes non-technical CEOs think "AGI employee replacement machine".
You are arguing the dictionary while I’m arguing the predictable, if not very well calculated and purposeful, misunderstanding.
The primary product of AI is labor displacement and consequently wage supression. This is what OpenAI and Anthropic are really selling. It didn't start with AI but AI is accelerating it.
This is what layoffs have been about since the pandemic. People in fear of losing their jobs do extra unpaid work and aren't asking for raises. The theoretical potential of AI gives companies the excuse to fire more people. The investment itself is directly used as a reason of why they need to cut back on labor.
Any sufficiently sized business can only feed the insatiable hunger for ever-increasing profits ultimately by cutting costs and raising prices. And what do we have now? High inflation and a decline in real wages. CEOs are just following this playbook.
And the result is that society is bouldering towards collapse. We're seeing the first hints of this with the youth unemployment crisis [1][2][3].
Also, who is going to buy anything when nobody has any money?
> Also, who is going to buy anything when nobody has any money?
This assumes that a mass consumer economy is necessary, when it isn't. Mass consumption is relatively new, for most of history economies functioned with just a small consuming elite and large underclass that consumed very little. We are already approaching that again in the states given that the top 10% of earners are already responsible for nearly half of all consumer spending.
There's a floor even in a mostly automated economy where some services are resistant to automation simply because the human element is the product. Luxury hospitality, personal care, etc. That billionaire is going to want a human masseuse, not a robot.
A highly automated economy could stabilize like this with a small elite population consuming luxury goods & services, served by a low-wage economic underclass human workforce.
Its certainly not a pleasant society, but its also not unsustainable given enough oppression or pacification (bread and circuses anyone?)
I don't have any sources regarding someone preferring humans for certain services over robots, just intuition there, and the fact that consuming human labor and time is itself a status signal of wealth, and the current growth of personal services.
As for connecting the dots, look at Brazil, one of the world's most unequal economies having a small consuming elite and a much, much larger low-wage service underclass. The gulf states as well. Granted, their circumstances don't map cleanly to a post-automation Western economy, but it does demonstrate that a largely bifurcated consumption based economy can exist and can be mildly stable.
Whether the US falls into that direction too will depending on politics. A bunch of mid-career knowledge workers aren't going to willingly to flip burgers in a service economy without some serious surveillance and oppression. But when thinking about it in those terms, the recent push for mass surveillance laws and tech along with the increasingly dangerous rhetoric around protests and "domestic terrorism" start to make sense.
and I don't know what worries me more - a burst in this bubble (and maybe some other tech stocks), or a failure of these valuations to be burst somehow, and even more concentration of capital and power around those corporations.
Most CEOs are not special. They are not especially smart, or skilled, or technical. The role self selects for sociopathy. That's not a quality that has any kind of linear relationship with intelligence. Quite the contrary.
A common misconception about AI is that it is intended to fully replace humans, which is incorrect. The purpose of AI is to reduce the need for human labor, and it has already been doing so. For example—though this is not an exact figure—a task that previously required 15 people might now only need 10. In no instance has the human element been completely replaced; rather, the reliance on manual labor has simply been reduced.
It's not exactly a misconception, when companies are pitching AI as a full and complete replacement for human employees. People are just reading the billboards on the side of the road.
I always found advertisements for AI to be so strange, why would you advertise your AI to the public as a danger for humanity that will also put everyone out of work? Such advertising would only appeal to sociopaths, but of course that's because it's intended to appeal to CEOs.
A "unit of work" that required X people to complete in Y time can now be done by X/Z people in Y time, where Z is whatever efficiency you are able to get out of applying AI tooling to your business.
For some companies, Z might be less than 1 though. ;-)
So you still need skilled people, just not the same amount as before, because you have different tools available to you.
This has happened before with other advancements in industrial/technological automation. It's not a new concept.
That sounds like 5 humans got replaced by AI. I don't think most people worry about whether all humans will be replaced, simply whether or not they will be replaced, or people they care about.
Or all 15 people are still employed doing the work of 22.5. Or even more people have been hired now that each person can generate 50% more value than they previously could. Or people are reallocated from the AI assisted task to another. Or some combination thereof.
Which is very short sighted. You or anyone close to you might not be replaced but it should be clear that you don't want to live in a society with 20% unemployment.
I have spent almost my entire adult life (since 1986) shipping products. One of the very first things that I learned, was that "shipping" > "designing".
There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported.
I liken it to having children. Conceiving them is fun. Delivering them is painful. Raising them, is a lifetime of work.
In my experience, the same type of thing applies to products that we ship (and charge money for).
If you can't make the visitor understand your entire complex product in 10 seconds, then you've lost them.
Your product has to be complex because that's where the software market is at. All of the low-hanging fruits have been taken by the time you identify them. Sure, someone will find a way to make money using new low-hanging fruits that arise due to technological changes but it's not going to be you. You probably don't have the business connections to make that work.
Then there's the technical debt!
Shipping is frankly the easy part. It's the operating overhead that often breaks you.
I liken it to free puppies.
I have always prided myself on writing concise, high-Quality code, because it tends to be quite debt-free.
So far, LLMs seem to deliver code with "Louie Da Loan Shark"-levels of tech debt.
I remember a .sig that went something along the lines of:
With that said, I've been programming for 25 years and I've only been a CEO for 3, so take what I said with a pinch of salt.
I do think people overestimate titles like this a lot, though, and it really comes down to what the company actually does and what is demanding for that company at that position/role. The CTO of a some-bullshit-as-a-service company may as well be straight out of college, because they're likely doing something trivial that literally anyone (including LLMs) could put together. The CTO of a well-used and reliable streaming service that handles a meaningful part of the world's Internet traffic is obviously solving a more interesting problem.
I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives want to ruin the company, they’re just incompetent and therefore make terrible decisions constantly.
Do they tend to make greater revenue or profits? Pay higher wages and offer greater benefits to employees?
However, I think there's a reason why coops seem to succeed at smaller scales, but there are essentially no large innovative coops.
There are a few large boring coops, and some small innovative ones, but seemingly something is making the CEO/investor board model the one large innovative companies are all using.
I suspect that it's both (1) access to capital is far harder for coops, and (2) that workplace democracy and hardcore mission focus aren't fully compatible. That is, "you cannot serve two masters" without losing focus on one of them.
If a company doesn't accumulate capital, it doesn't scale in complexity. It can grow by having more people do more of the same things, but it can't move into markets that demand anything complex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy
Acting like centrally planned dictatorships is a good form of collaboration is just so off base. There's no reason to think that introducing democracy into the work place wouldn't immediately benefit both workers + customers.
If this sounds crazy the C suite + board already vote on who gets hired into the executive team, vote for the direction of the company, and vote for their compensation packages (hint, they never decrease them).
Why shouldn't workers be legally enabled to do the same? What is the justification to this? I'm curious to hear it because the only way people can justify the current system is declaring that some people are actually more deserving of prestige, money, and benefits while others deserve to suffer.
With income inequality increasing, healthcare outcomes worsening, and children literally becoming stupider isn't it time to question the current system and ask ourselves if this is the society we truly want?
on the contrary, it seems to be one of the few jobs that seems to require absolutely no qualifications to have.
What you need to do to be CEO is.... convince someone to lend you money in the hope that you'll get it back to them.
I've worked under some absolutely awful people who wouldn't pass an interview anywhere, but somehow they're CEOs, because they can smarm there way into more money consistently.
And it should be noted that many of these people lending money are in a similar situation of not being required to have any qualifications. Sure, some of them have worked their way up through sound investment after sound investment, but many of them were either born into their position or simply got lucky at some point along the way. Just think of all the money investors threw away pursuing crypto and NFTs for example. Many of those investments were transparently stupid from day 1.
This is a broad range of skills and to actually be a CEO, you need to really hone these skills and be among the very top. To be good at those, just enough to qualify for a modest CEO role at a small start-up, you generally don't have the time to be good at anything else.
Saying that you don't need any skills is mischaracterizing it. You don't need any value-creating skills, yes, but you need significant value-capturing skills.
I can imagine a world were all companies become empty of workers and only executives remain and they would just have meetings with each other while they starve and would explain it away as a new diet they're on. There would be no petrol and they would be forced to walk to work and would say that it's their new fitness routine... And they would all believe each other.
CEOs that look at that and think they need to reduce headcount seem to also be signaling they don’t know what to do with increased resources
a bad king and a bad CEO could be replaced with a spinning top with no loss in productivity (and maybe some gain).
It also made me realize that most the so called “creatives” in marketing and PR also just repeat variations of the same few templates. Not much real creativity there.
The code is human + AI, the management is only AI
Would you rather take instructions from a ruthless robot or ruthless flesh sack?
There are also a LOT of bad software developers.
When they meet, the software developer is fired.
The CEO exits after a while, after exercising their stock options...
This is a broad generalization of employees. There will be some "routine tasks" that can be done by AI, now that is a lot more powerful.
There won't be as many employees needed for routine work - for example L1 and L2 support work. For example, many companies had ML engineers building models for various models. Companies can get that off the shelf from AI companies. They don't need a big team of model builders now.
L2 issues are already involved in some way often revealing some kind of system failure, requiring context and exploration to understand, and judgement (and perhaps even system overrides) to fix.
I could see “automated L2 is the new L1” improvements, but without a big capability jump and/or a resource bonfire, I don’t think even frontier models would effectively replace good L2 staff.
They might magnify good L2 staff so fewer are needed (and maybe even help L1 staff become L2).
You know who can't do that? People who call L1 support.
Astronaut holding up gun to other astronaut
Always have been.
Which indicates: the management believes there are productivity gains from AI use, but adoption lags due to inertia and reluctance to change existing workflows.
Methinks adoption lags due to management's inability to align incentives such that productivity gains are rewarded.
The problem is that the wrong eyes are seeing it.
We need these kinds of articles to be published in places that executives read, and tailored to their audience.
AI recovery is going to be a big wave of consulting over the next several years, maybe very publicly or maybe quietly, but it's going to be a thing. That doesn't mean "all AI is bad" or any other such nonsense, it means that there are a lot of companies out there right now that are doing it wrong and will need help.
The executives that get ahead of this are going to be the winners.
Problem is, a CEO can fire employees, find out it was a dumb decision, then leave with a million dollar severance package. So they don't really care when they're wrong.
Ideally contractors that benefit you personally (eg: your buddy who now owes you one), but definitely contractors that let you outsource the responsibility.
Even better if you get some management consultant to suggest the idea and/or do the subcontracting.
Definitely buys you a few quarters of bonus and some time to land your next gig.
The solution - linux has utility called piper. I downloaded the repo and just told codex - figure out what piper is doing and create me a small utility to do it under windows. So the jolly critter started experimenting with hex commands, then pulled some other repo on which piper depended figured out how to enable said onboard mode and 10-sh minutes later I had small python script that did what i needed to do.
That would have taken probably half a day of work for a human.
There are many stupid CEO and organizations which are not committed to quality. And a lot of employees that are too set in their ways. But the instinct that underinvesting in AI is more dangerous than overinvesting is right. Doomed if you do, doomed if you don't
"To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer" - this is from the 60, but right now is turned into overdrive.
A* search -> AI
Backtracking -> AI
Neural Networks -> AI
Fuzzy Logic -> AI
Genetic Algorithm -> AI
Deep Learning -> AI
Generative "AI" -> AI
Similar to Tesla naming it's driver assistant "auto-pilot" in 2015 and your average Joe thought he would be able to sleep while the car would drive him to work.
The CEO just hear AI and think of AGI. They expect Skynet.
You are arguing the dictionary while I’m arguing the predictable, if not very well calculated and purposeful, misunderstanding.
This is what layoffs have been about since the pandemic. People in fear of losing their jobs do extra unpaid work and aren't asking for raises. The theoretical potential of AI gives companies the excuse to fire more people. The investment itself is directly used as a reason of why they need to cut back on labor.
Any sufficiently sized business can only feed the insatiable hunger for ever-increasing profits ultimately by cutting costs and raising prices. And what do we have now? High inflation and a decline in real wages. CEOs are just following this playbook.
And the result is that society is bouldering towards collapse. We're seeing the first hints of this with the youth unemployment crisis [1][2][3].
Also, who is going to buy anything when nobody has any money?
[1]: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americas-10-million...
[2]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/twelve-ways-to-fix-the-yo...
[3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy026x9jpd0o
This assumes that a mass consumer economy is necessary, when it isn't. Mass consumption is relatively new, for most of history economies functioned with just a small consuming elite and large underclass that consumed very little. We are already approaching that again in the states given that the top 10% of earners are already responsible for nearly half of all consumer spending.
There's a floor even in a mostly automated economy where some services are resistant to automation simply because the human element is the product. Luxury hospitality, personal care, etc. That billionaire is going to want a human masseuse, not a robot.
A highly automated economy could stabilize like this with a small elite population consuming luxury goods & services, served by a low-wage economic underclass human workforce.
Its certainly not a pleasant society, but its also not unsustainable given enough oppression or pacification (bread and circuses anyone?)
As for services increasingly unaffordable by the workers providing them, that's Baumol's cost disease (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect)
I don't have any sources regarding someone preferring humans for certain services over robots, just intuition there, and the fact that consuming human labor and time is itself a status signal of wealth, and the current growth of personal services.
As for connecting the dots, look at Brazil, one of the world's most unequal economies having a small consuming elite and a much, much larger low-wage service underclass. The gulf states as well. Granted, their circumstances don't map cleanly to a post-automation Western economy, but it does demonstrate that a largely bifurcated consumption based economy can exist and can be mildly stable.
Whether the US falls into that direction too will depending on politics. A bunch of mid-career knowledge workers aren't going to willingly to flip burgers in a service economy without some serious surveillance and oppression. But when thinking about it in those terms, the recent push for mass surveillance laws and tech along with the increasingly dangerous rhetoric around protests and "domestic terrorism" start to make sense.
Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48295679
I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379
https://tomtunguz.com/spacex-openai-anthropic-ipo-2026/
and I don't know what worries me more - a burst in this bubble (and maybe some other tech stocks), or a failure of these valuations to be burst somehow, and even more concentration of capital and power around those corporations.
You mean, this is an entirely made-up figure.
A "unit of work" that required X people to complete in Y time can now be done by X/Z people in Y time, where Z is whatever efficiency you are able to get out of applying AI tooling to your business.
For some companies, Z might be less than 1 though. ;-)
So you still need skilled people, just not the same amount as before, because you have different tools available to you.
This has happened before with other advancements in industrial/technological automation. It's not a new concept.