Unless one choses to bargain. Perhaps collectively.

My employers who are introducing AI are not laughing evil supervillains hoovering up all the excess profits, they are normal people who wanted long careers and are as nervous as anyone about competition amd what AI will do to organizations if people become truly redundant.

It is almost reassuring to think that rich and powerful people all know what they are doing every step of the way. A handful may, but most certainly do not. Most are also terrified of AI. Stable profits are always better than transformative change, if you already have power and riches. Look at how insane companies are acting right now with token quotas for employees and mandates AI usage - the goal is not to milk profits but to not fall behind every other company in case this becomes table stakes. They are trying not to be devoured by a beast they don't understand.

When the AI bubble pops, large companies will be extremely relieved to stop throwing money into the wind playing this game. For most companies, the AI arms race is a huge hassle. They are fine with losing money in the short term and even in the long term as long as they can find a stable path forward.

This is the exact same trajectory as when the internet came out and every insurance company and toothpick manufacturer spent gobs of money to have a brochure website built because everyone else had one. This will play out differently, but recognize most companies are acting entirely from a place of fear right now.

"Hence too the economic paradox, that the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer's time and that of his family, at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital." - some crazy radical economist, nearly 200 years ago

Companies don’t care about it but governments certainly do.

Over the past 150 years, the work week dropped from 70+ to 35h in France.

Granted that’s a long time horizon but still.

This narrative is clean, matches expectations and history.

But let's be clear - we all probably own a decent part of our companies (collectively). Productivity gains mean winning the race to market, profits, glory. And that means ownership is valuable.

At the _very least_, you can push your company stock higher and buy it with your 10% IRA contributions or through a similar investment program and make 16x your investment over your 40 year career.

It's easy to look tactically at productivity gains being "captured" by high CEO bonuses, and that's legitimate, but we have so sufficiently seized the means of wealth production if we have stock options and market access that I'm not sure it's really valid to say we get, paraphrasing, "nothing if not a day off work".

"The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must." — Thucydides

> Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't.

In a capitalist society, choices are made according to supply and demand.

In a world where there's a positive supply shock (in this case, there's a lot more programming available for purchase today than there was a year ago), supply goes up. We therefore expect the price for the good to decrease.

This has nothing to do with power or whether people care about xyz. It's a consequence of the economic system we live under.

You can desire to live under a different economic system! That's logically coherent. But if you want the laws of supply and demand not to apply to you, that's what you're asking for.

Honestly I'm getting tired of this narrative. People take the benefits of capitalism for granted (indeed most of us on this forum do very well for ourselves relative to the average person in our country and around the world), but we blame all of its downsides on "bad people".