> Generating an extra $400 per year in value, per employee, isn't that much extra.

I agree, and would add that it’s contributing to inflation in hard assets.

Basically:

* it’s a safe bet that labor will have lower value in 2031 than it has today

* if you have a billion to spend, and you agree, you will be inclined to put your wealth into hard assets, because AI depends on them

In a really abstract way, the world is not responsible for feeding a new class of workers: robots.

And robots consume electricity, water, space, and generate heat.

Which is why those sectors are feeling the affects of supply and demand.

Most people in the economy do not use Slack. That tool may be most beneficial to those people who stand to lose jobs to AI displacement. Maybe after everyone is pink-slipped for an LLM or AI chatbot tool the total cost to the employer is reduced enough that they are willing to spend part of the money they saved eliminating warm bodies on AI tools and willing to pay a higher per employee price.

I think with a smaller employee pool though it is unlikely that it all evens out without the AI providers holding the users hostage for quarterly profits' sake.

That AI will have to be significantly preferable to the baseline of open models running on cheap third-party inference providers, or even on-prem. This is a bit of a challenge for the big proprietary firms.

This is true though I think even if the employer provides all this on a per employee basis, the number of eligible employees, after everyone who stands to lose a job because of a shift to AI tools, will be low enough that each employee will need to add a lot of value for this to be worth it to an employer so the stated number is probably way too low. Ordinary people may just migrate from Apple products to something that is more affordable or, in the extreme case, walk away from the whole surveillance economy. Those people would not buy into any of this.

Why are they not getting the iPhones paid by employers now?

The chart you listed is for the years before the CCP won the civil war in 1949. But agreed that many of the problems overcome were also problems that were created after the war.

Huh? No they don’t.