this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
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Once again, the point of Ai is to punish labor, not to increase productivity. It's profitable by decreasing cost of labor through lowered wages, not by decreasing amount of labor. Every article fighting about efficiency to do the work in terms of hours only misses this.
Plus, class consciousness of the bourgeois makes it to where lost profit in exchange for long term containment of labor through this punishment is a positive
This is what I tell people at work. Bosses have been extremely honest about it. In their telling, we are “unlocking value” by being to replace a highly paid data scientist and a senior analyst with a single junior analyst. The whole point is to deskill the roles so they can pay fewer people less money. This is on top of the usual offshoring and outsourcing.
I don't even think you have to go this far, its really just that wages of even specialists cns be lowered because they first use Ai as a stick to fire (some of) them, then rehire labor at lower costs for the same work. They will expect the same skill, just lower wages because of the magic 'there's AI' button they theorize to have
From a leadership perspective they will absolutely see that AIs can somewhat competently write emails and extrapolate that it can do so much more resulting in workers getting shafted with salaries and workloads.
I agree, but I don't think this is the driving force. It's just a way that this driving force is visible and concreyely comes into existence. The driving force is the need to punish labor to drive down wages, and Ai is just an excuse (and it has multiple forms).
What you're stating is 1 concrete way that this systemic force acts
That's absolutely the macro goal. On the smaller middle management scale it manifests as rapid adoption of crap because that crap is actually really good at doing fake work which is all they know.
These numbnuts have usually drunk the Kool aid and think their job is the most difficult thing in the world, so when a skinner box can make them happy, they'll gladly say that it's ready to do the thing they're literally trained to do, which is punish labor.
Would also encourage you to try to not use ableist language. There was recently a good post on the disabled channel about words that can be harmful and some handy replacements.
I like calling them dipshits :)
Fixed
Management is correct if they think 'it's ready to do the thing they're literally trained to do, which is punish labor'.
That's exactly my point. I don't think they're just bumbling and tripping into this. Regardless of the competence of the manager, the result is the same. I know managers who know exactly how shitty the slop toasters do the work of their people, and they also know that the hard work is actually done by those under them. But AI is useful to say 'but AI means I don't have to pay you as much, and if you don't believe me, try the next company.'
It's bigger than incompetent managers, and it's led by a competent system that we need to confront. I don't like acting like our enemies are incompetent when they are either very competent at this or exist in a system that acts as if it is competent.
Acting like managers are just incompetent can make workers angry, and that has its uses. But I think it's much more valuable to act like they're very competent but evil.
Some are competent, but generally they're only competent as a subclass of class traitor. In terms of competence as workers, they're almost always significantly lacking. Though are meant to pretend to be.
The AI thing it's, on a whole, a drive to break up labor. But on an individual level, as workers interact with that system, it's largely managers that are adopting it due to their incompetence and fear of their staff.
I think the current drive is meant to be wholly threat based, if they were acting properly, they wouldn't do me layoffs. They'd instead slow hiring and put the monster next to everyone. When they play their hand and actually try and replace people with it, it breaks everything and ruins the illusion.