2. Company ranks their employees, lays off the lowest ranking percentage of people responsible for 10% of the productivity
3. Company reduces headcount
Rinse and repeat and then most people will be out of a job, unless stacked ranking is outlawed.
I had a conversation recently about this very thing. They were complaining that Salesforce is very hard to learn, even for simple tasks.
I asked why not use AI assistants? Because in practice they just aren’t capable of connecting the dots between documentation and configuration to complete the task at hand at the required level of customization. And that gap that exists between how things are stated to work and what’s actually required is where a lot of jobs are done and AI isn’t close to fixing. Which is why I still remain convinced that what’s being called AI is nothing more than a marketing tool to sell enterprise software and that jobs are going to be destroyed by it.
So, maybe it's actually helping offset the silicon valley investor war on compensation a little.
And it's not like those laid off can't start their own, disruptive ventures. As employees get more efficient, it'll be easier to run small, nimble companies that take on the big leagues. I'm quite optimistic about all of it.
And who yields that power and can use it with little consequences will do it.
Why should elites allow the global population to grow indefinetely if it threatens their survival? Predictably the elites will use their advantage to compete against the masses for resources to ensure their continued survival.
AI will create a large power asymmetry which will inevitably result in large scale abuse with no limits.
In almost every economy where the elite does not need the support of the population to be wealthy and to exercise territorial control, the result is almost always a brutal dictatorship where the population is weakened and disarmed so they do not revolt.
The elites in the countries that suffer this rely on countries who are buying from them and if democracies made it illegal to do business with such countries many would not be sustainable.
And the curse can be avoided. Norway has successfully avoided the resource curse through creation of a sovereign wealth fund (Government Pension Fund Global) to manage surplus oil revenues but to accomplish this it had a long-standing tradition of democracy and rule of law ensuring government accountability.
AI could cause a problem similar to the resource curse. Because you could have a strong service economy while having 99% unemployment.
That's a totally unrealistic take... on the scale of "communism". Not every person is a perfect communist, and not every person is a business man.
Now I know you may say that only some need to create disruptive ventures and hire others then, but that's also unrealistic due to power imbalances.
What will turn the wheel is how capitalism works right now: If too many people are unemployed and too few people can afford your mass market product, someone will need to give the unemployed a job or money so they can participate in the "free" market.
Or as Stafford Beer would say - The purpose of a system is what it does.
I'd say Copilot makes me 5% more productive, as in - MS CP bloat adds 5% to the stack of stuff I need to remove from clients' Windows systems. Most of that is because I have to open Edge and cleaning Edge is a particularly tedious process.
None of this is hyperbole, btw. Keeping up with endless new Windows bloat/nags/traps/guff is a regular part of my billable hours.