Comment by ent001

This is my biggest problem with the current state of things. The loss in quality of life out weights the gains in productivity. And they are concentrated on highly conscientiousness individuals, those who already got silently taxed with most of the 80% of the work to get the last 20% of the results. So it is now compounding, if you care your workload will approximate 99,99..% of the total workload divided by the number of high conscientiousness individuals in your team/organization.

The current hype cycle might even represent a net global gain like some people argue. But it represents yet more externality driven exploitation. Remains to be seen what the new equilibrium will be given that now the population being exploited is not only close to the core of the world system but also already overburdened.

I do think it represents a mere acceleration of the previous trend that resulted since around 2005 in an explosion of average (not median) pay for software developers due to similar dynamics. If the system settles on a new level of pay that manages to convince enough people of enough skill to go along, it might just hum along and not implode. As for the rest of us, welcome to the growing permanent underclass and brace for the impact of the climate wars. We will be the fodder that will insulate the chosen ones under their air conditioned domes.