And that's how that "layoff Discord" can produce something that can matter to customers. It will be a smaller company, and small companies have a serious advantage when it comes to support: you can get an actual human, maybe even the main dev, he can actually do things rather than transferring you from chatbot to bureaucracy. It doesn't scale, but it may be enough to get a competitor started.

As for connections, you may have inadvertently let go of the guy who has the connections. And you may have fired a perfectly functional team, ready for from clever entrepreneur with connections (who may be one of the fired) to pick up. It is so much of a recognized problem that some big companies hire people just so that their competitors can't have them.

On the B2B level, business is basically relationships, because you want to have a person that you trust who you can go to with any concerns about your multimillion-$ relationship. The relationships are the hard part, which is why the biggest department in any enterprise startup is sales, and requests from the salespeople usually dominate the feature roadmap.

But on a consumer level, most companies invest precisely zero in relationships, because it is far too expensive to build a relationship with 300M consumers who each pay you $50/year. The parts that matter are a.) building a brand image b.) delivering a "good enough" product and c.) doing it cheaply.

AI does extremely well at all 3 of those. It's great at generating fictitious but plausible-sounding content that makes you feel great about yourself. It's a passable approximation at explaining how things are made, enough that a small organization could probably deliver a good-enough product. And it replaces all of those pesky humans that require HR departments and legal employment contracts and sales relationships and customer service. A significant portion of the work in any industry is simply greasing the supply chain, making all those transactions that need to happen along the way happen. Vertically integrate and automate those and you could probably rebuild the industry in a much cheaper, more efficient way.

I think many people are thinking too small with AI, on the level of "how will this help me do a task?" or "how will this help my job?" or "how will this help improve my company by getting rid of jobs?" The real money is in "how will this revolutionize the industry by getting rid of all the other companies?" or even "how will this replace society so there is a fair playing field for new industries to get started?"

That's how a lot of companies are made, even huge ones. Not everything comes from a specific focus, it's just "let's see what works to build a business that can make us money".

And now you don't even have to use specialist knowledge, just describe the idea to AI and AI will implement it clean-room.

Whether this is realistic or not, I can imagine some people actually believing it.

The less society spends on developers, the less valuable software is. If the day comes that we employ zero developers, then software will be worth zero dollars.

And yet, software will still be fulfilling an essential part of society, it just wont be a thing people are willing to pay for. So AI will still be around, and will still be essential (because somehow we have to maintain all this software), and AI will get better and better.

Eventually any knowledge work will be worth zero. Including the C-suite--especially the c-suite!

I think it lags. There was a sag between the mid-70s and mid-90s, which is when computers and the Internet were being rapidly developed but weren't really hitting the business mainstream. But late 90s through today it clearly ramped up a lot -- my bet is this is because of IT. It just takes a long time, it's not a sharp jump because not every business gets on board immediately and productively.

My guess is AI ends up the same. But then again, I'm not an economist, only a developer, so I just think I can tell anything about that productivity graph.

If I understand correctly, the spike in 2020 was not any kind of jump in real productivity, either, it is an artifact of how the calculation is made -- there was a sudden drop in hours from low paid workers who typically have a lower than average contribution to productivity (as measured), so laying a bunch of them off skews the per-hour calculation. Then as things settled down companies re-hired, and then over-hired.

Even if you don’t like the concept of co-ops it’s fairly easy to ask yourself if you would you be more or less motivated if you shared more in the success of a company rather than it being sucked up by shareholders?

According to AI boosters he should be able to make magnitude more now

And you do it to provide the product/service, provide for your workers, etc

Would love to see just one example of a billion+ valuation company with nothing but C-suite and that against the ratio of companies with 1000+ employees who are worth a billion+. The only two sub-dozen workers that come to mind for me are Theranos and Bernie Madoff and I'm not sure they are examples of success.

By speaking of boosting, they add an implication that the opinion isn't as genuine as their own and is perhaps motivated by some sort of financial benefit.

Am I wrong?

It’s a shibboleth because it’s a highly specific phrase used by these people.

The fact that it’s self-explanatory doesn’t take away from that.

It’s a shibboleth in the way it’s used. I see the word “booster” applied more to AI than any other topic because it’s the shibboleth chosen to represent that specific set of ideologies about AI.

“AI booster” appears 100X more often than I ever saw “cryptocurrency booster” and the phrase is always associated with people who have a specific ideology about AI.