Comment by jmyeet

This is all basic economics.

Companies can grow organically or through strategy and adding new verticals to a point. Eventually they're too large for that. They own the whole market, they can't get regulatory approval for acquisitions and so on. At this point they only really grow at the same rate the industry or the economy does.

At this point (or often long before), the only way to increase profits is to raise prices and/or reduce costs. Profits tend to decline over time so there is constant pressure to reduce costs to statisfy the insatiable need for increasing profits.

This is the real product AI is selling: cutting wages. It's a combination of displacing workers (which, thus far, hasn't been all that successful). Where it is successful is to have the threat of layoffs hanging over your workers, getting them to do extra unpaid work for the same wages and making sure they can't ask for raises.

That's what's paying for all this AI investment.

So I agree with you: the real problem isn't AI. It's capitalism.