Most of the shit going on right now can be explained by fatcats in the West, having run out of Economic growth to capture as the West's growth rate pretty much collapsed (quite possible due to the very actions those fatcats during the Neoliberal era, were amongst other things Social Mobility collapsed), have increasingly started pillaging the wealth and productive capacity of the rest of society, or in other words, exploiting everybody else.

It's a vicious cycle were the tightening of the screws on everybody else leads to lower productivity and higher discontent which in turn leads to further tightening of the screws on everybody else in order for the elites to keep on getting wealthier at the same rate.

AI was supposed to be a way for the fatcats to be able to extract even more wealth from the rest whist having less exposure to all those pesky natural human and societal responses to that.

I'm not even sure this is about the desire for quick riches.

If AI and human labor cost exactly the same, I bet most CEOs would still want to fire everyone and replace them with AI. Because they prefer the sycophantic AI over humans who might sometimes talk back and disagree ... or worse, try to form a union. And add to that just some pig-headed enjoyment of cruelty.

"The people are revolting" takes on a new meaning every time somebody's net worth gains a comma.

It won't. AI doesn't fire anyone. AI doesn't replace anyone. AI shows the potential of doing the same job as a human, so another human fires that person and replaces them with an AI.

The CEO isn't going to fire himself. His "replacement" with AI is going to be him using it to make decisions, and feeling so smart about "using all the tools available", but he'll still be there to collect a paycheck.

That’s an interesting thought. Do you think they will downsize boards of directors and slowly whittle away the executives? Either they won’t stand for it to ensure that they and their friends all stay rich, or they can use it to exclude the people they disliked all along and it can be a slow voting out like reality TV. The general egoistic nature of most billionaires makes me lean toward the latter

The class with the least self-preservation and the most need for attention working as expected.

firing people isnt wage theft 🙄 Yes unjustified firings and wage theft are both evil, but that doesn't make them the same thing. Same as telling kids santa isn't real ain't wage theft.