Organizations are choosing to eliminate workers rather than amplify them with AI because they'd rather own 100% of diminished capacity than share proceeds from exponentially increased capacity. That's the rent extraction model consuming its own productive infrastructure. The Stanford study documents organizations systematically choosing inferior economic strategies because their rent-extraction frameworks cannot conceptualize workers as productive assets to amplify. This reveals that these organizations are economic rent-seekers that happen to have productive workers, not production companies that happen to extract rents. When forced to choose between preserving rent extraction structures or maximizing value creation, they preserve extraction even at the cost of destroying productive capacity. So what comes next?

> So what comes next?

When you don’t need as many people because of automation, you also don’t need them to fight your wars. You use drones and other automated weapons. You don’t need things like democracy because that was to prevent people from turning to revolution, and that problem has been solved with automated weapons. So then you don’t really need as many people anymore, so you stop providing the expensive healthcare, food production, and water to keep them all alive

Your claim is not supported by the paper:

"Furthermore, employment declines are concentrated in occupations where AI is more likely to automate, rather than augment, human labor."

No mention of rent-seeking.

No evidence they are being economically short-sighted.

> they'd rather own 100% of diminished capacity than share proceeds from exponentially increased capacity

They're using cheap AI to replace more expensive humans. There's no reason to think they are missing some exponential expansion opportunity that keeping those humans would achieve, and every reason to think otherwise.

Probably because there are no free markets anymore, it's all monopoly, cartel, and/or regulatory capture.

Competition would fix a whole lot of problems.

I hope AI fuels a re-independence of many industries by making business software discovery and integration cheap and easy, every plumber with more than 10 years experience should own their company with low cost software running it, the efficiency gains from consolidating resources a la private equity for marketing and book keeping go away in an AI powered world

> So what comes next?

Feudalism.

> This reveals that these organizations are economic rent-seekers that happen to have productive workers, not production companies that happen to extract rents.

Your perspective is so contrary to reality I'm actually not sure if you're trolling or not. There is no such thing as pure value creation. In order for labor to create value, it must be aligned with the company's value proposition, i.e. what convinces customers to pay for the value that the company provides. Half the people off in the corner building something that they think is valuable are actually building something that customers do not care about, won't pay more for, and increase the company's maintenance burden.

Keeping labor aligned with value creation is the whole game. If it wasn't, then all these rent-seeking-first enterprises would have fired their layers and layers of middle management a long time ago; the company needs to pay them a salary (reducing profits) but they don't write any code / "produce any value". All these massive corporations would have moved to a flat management hierarchy a long time ago, if labor was truly capable of aligning itself to improving value generation; and if you think there's some nefarious/conspiratorial reason why massive corporations don't do that, then most of them would have been out-competed a long time ago by co-ops with flat management hierarchies that could produce the same value at a lower price due to lower administration costs.

Needing to hire employees is a necessary evil for businesses. Aligning employees is hard. Motivating employees is hard. Communication is hard. Businesses do not exist to provide people with jobs, which are created out of sheer necessity, and are destroyed when that necessity goes away.

What data or special insight do you have as to whether amplifying or eliminating is actually productive?

This argument is vacuous if you consider a marginal worker. Let's say AI eliminates one worker, Bob. You could argue "it was better to amplify Bob and share the gains". However, that assumes the company needs more of whatever Bob produces. That means you could also make an argument "given that the company didn't previously hire another worker Bill ~= Bob, it doesn't want to share gains that Bill would have provided blah blah". Ad absurdum, any company not trying to keep hiring infinitely is doing rent extraction.

You could make a much more narrow argument that cost of hiring Bill was higher than his marginal contribution but cost of keeping Bob + AI is lower than their combined contribution, but that's something you actually need to justify. Or, at the very least, justify why you know that it is, better than people running the company.

It's really just the american companies deciding to do this. Seems like glorified suicide, tbh

Late Stage Capitalism. The real paper clip maximizers are the Silicon Valley and Wallstreet bros we met along the way.

ChatGPT (might have) made a few superfluous email jobs obsolete and the people responding to this comment are acting like we’re standing on the threshold of Terminator 3.