Explain Like I'm Five

You may find this blog entry by Nikhil Suresh useful.

There are frankly a lot of companies currently being led by individuals suffering from AI psychosis. Executives who plan their operations around AI...by asking for advice from AI.

The problem with AI is that it is very good at creating technical demonstrations good enough to persuade people who are not experts in the field. Executives have no idea how their workers actually do their jobs. They could ask the workers to assess the AI tools, but they don't trust the workers to be honest, as the executives hope to use the AI to lay off the workers.

The ownership class has really taken to AI as a religion. They're chasing the rapture. They have no connection to the actual work their investments are based on, so they are easily scammed by AI con artists.

However, America has an extremely authoritarian corporate culture. Most corporate leaders are surrounded by yes men and fire anyone who contradicts them. It's very Death of Stalin. Where once the top leaders really decide on something, any criticism of that idea becomes heresy.

So what is happening is that shit flows down here. The wealthy owners of companies have convinced themselves that they'll be able to cut their labor force in half, so they push the board of directors to deploy AI as fast and widely as possible. The board directs the CEO. The CEO and other executives direct middle management. Middle management filters the commands down to workers.

AI is a problem almost purpose-built to take advantage of the flaws in our corporate governance models. In a world where the economy was primarily run by worker-owned co-ops, this would never happen. But in our economy, all the people actually doing the real work have zero power over how the company is run. All the decisions are made by people who don't know how the company's workers actually do their jobs.

This creates a culture of compliance. If you've ever worked in a corporate environment, you'll be familiar with ideas like toxic positivity. In most corporate environments, losing the company money is a far less offensive than contradicting the executives who are losing the company money. The owners decree that companies go all in on AI, and anyone down the chain who points out the emperor has no clothes gets fired.

This is fundamentally a problem of economic organization.

This is going to cause a second Great Depression.