Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue Nov 04, 2025 2:20 am
malloc wrote: ↑Mon Nov 03, 2025 7:57 pm
Sure but tech industry leaders believe it can replace us. I am just genuinely curious what they expect to happen once they've achieved their goals, even if such goals prove impossible in practice.
I don't think there's really an endgame. They figure out it's good for them if they spend less on human workers; the rest is someone else's problem and they figure it'll sort itself out eventually. At least that's what happened with moving jobs overseas.
More cynically, there are plenty of advantages to economic hardship and a depressed job markets.
According to strict Marxism, bosses don't really know what they're doing-- they are just playing their part in a dialectical drama that leads to Marxism. I don't agree but I think Marx has a point: no one is really thinking this stuff through. They aren't conworlding; they're reacting to their immediate problems. And a CEO always thinks labor is too expensive.
When I was growing up, theorists pointed out that the more prosperous ordinary people were, the bigger the market, thus the more money there was to be made. That actually fit with how the economy worked at that time. Companies were run by managers-- ownership was a wide class that couldn't control individual companies.
Was there some master plan to move back to plutocracy? I don't think so, but there was a lot of pressure to take steps in that direction, and they added up. (And let's not forget that there was a lot of pressure in the other direction too. As I've said before, conservatives lost their mind precisely because they feared losing power forever.)
Similarly there's no master plan now, just a mixture of hoping to reduce headcount, and a fear of missing out.