alt Hacker NewsI'm not a VC guru but in my opinion you can't include the time and money it takes to grow a tree and mine the iron to compare the time it takes to hammer in a nail with a hammer versus using your fist.
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That’s how policy makers and concentrated decision power class get completely disconnected from actual resources at stake and what actual constraints need to be weighted. If a job require to put a blindfold and a sound blocker headset preventing to hear the things people scream, people in the role will happily accelerate against the wall the are induced to ignore.
This is not even specific to capitalism or VC mind you. Look how PRC led to the Great Chinese Famine. That’s why actual democracies (not the inter-elected aristocraties ), despite all their downsides, are so damn interesting. Corruption, negligence, or mere error with catastrophic follows, is easily spread in a situation where small core of individuals monopolize greatest part of decision weight, but is logistically impossible to achieve in a system optimized for widespread and highly redundant power responsibilities.
Your framing assumes that because the hammer is there, its manufacturing cost vanishes. In reality, someone had to pay that cost, and a holistic view has to decide whether building and maintaining that entire tool chain is actually cheaper than just paying humans to do the job. Often, we still choose the tool even when it raises true total cost per unit, because we value convenience or speed. That’s exactly what’s happening with many AI deployments.