We got:
- A: "AI helps in automating tedious tasks"
- B: "Your workforce can be more motivated and productive"
- C: "You can do more with fewer people"
Why not advertise A → B, stop there and let their customers do the reasoning for B → C themselves? Why go straight to a hyperbolic A → C and swallow all the hate that comes with it?
My own presumption is that we got that strange fetish for optimization (C) and just don't trust our own ambitions to make the potential gain in productivity (B) work any other way.
"Your workforce will be more productive" sounds much less impressive than "OMG you will literally not need employees anymore!! 10x profits!!"
Even if they did, would you believe them? Here's Zuckerberg on how he sees "Personal Superintelligence": https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/
Compare that to the $1.4 trillion lawsuit now in the news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48817682
Or compare Musk's promises to what's delivered. His self-driving timelines has its own Wikipedia page; how much he opined DOGE could save could be falsified by the top-level breakdown of the US federal budget. He used to be worried about AI, "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon", now he's saying he wants more Tesla shares for the "robot army" which his SpaceX presentations say will be a billion* strong.
* though if you just naïvely apply the numbers here, that factory will also be "on fire": https://www.terafab.ai
AI founders are OK with people hating them, because people truly absolutely dont matter.
I think the real error was the notion that they could sell this story to investors without the rest of the population noticing.
If you haven’t read it already, I can recommend “Careless People”, this is a constant theme in the book.
But as a PR person I can guarantee you it's not possible to go around such perception shifts through money alone.
Have the people with money considered doing more charitable acts/events for the people with less money to demonstrate that the tech industry isn't just here to extract wealth from the poor/many and transfer it to rich/few?
I think the problem is that the tech industry in large is just here to extract wealth from the many and transfer it to the few. That's why it's focused on scale.
People aren't dumb, and most of the time they can see when they're on the receiving end of an extractive relationship - even if there's lots of PR work going on to hide that reality from them.
Unfortunately for them more than just the investors were paying attention to the pitch. So now they are trying to say "of course it won't unemploy people (wink) it may even create more jobs (snicker)."
Musk's SpaceX TAM is roughly as you say, it's "subsume all currently existing desk jobs", which makes it simultaneously absurdly over-confident in the short term and treating this all as a zero-sum game where those jobs just go away and no new (potentially also automatable) jobs get invented, which in turn says he doesn't think anywhere is going to shift from primary and secondary economies to tertiary economies.
Zuckerberg may be full of himself, but does at least (pay someone else to?) write a vision that at least has growth-sounding phrases in it: https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/
they're not pitching to the average person, they're talking to C-levels, private equity, other ruthless billionaires, etc.
and when you have a solution that will eliminate the workers, why do you care about lying to the workers? instead of being lambasted about being blunt and evil you'll be lambasted about being duplicitous and evil