We've lost our way as a people.
Numerous paths that can be taken from that first step. Many more pressing in this moment in history. I'll speak to a piece I'm most familiar with, the MBA'ification of business and be eternally thankful for those covering the rest.
MBA'ification. Boeing'ification, if you will. The practice of promoting men (almost always) who have never been close to the actual work of the business to the top of the org chart until planes start literally falling out of the sky.
Now this has been covered.
But this is in no way isolated to Boeing. Every PE-backed org in existence is dealing with this in some capacity. A hollowing out of the ecosystem that creates real value for customers in order to make paper value for potential buyers. In many ways, this is not new human behavior. James C. Scott does an incredible job of impressing that in Seeing Like a State; showing the consequences of governmental practices that seek to simplify complex systems down to stats. What may be new'ish is it happening in business at this scale.
ZIRP, Citizen's United, and the complete failure of our regulatory bodies have resulted in a concentration of wealth and power in Capitalists the world has never seen. I'll punt on the morality of this--it deserves its own piece--and solely focus on its efficacy. This state of affairs is destroying RealValue:tm: as it extracts profits from it.
What's RealValue:tm:?
I mean the utility provided by the company that customers donate to, lease, or buy.
I mean a stable software product that saves folks time or solves a previously unsolved problem without toppling over under the injection of AI slop and hallucination.
I mean a plane that goes from Point A to Point B without cutting short the lives and experiences of hundreds of individuals.
The crux of the problem is that the folks making decisions are too far away from the actual work. They don't have time or inclination to grok the nuance of their domain. As a result, nonsensical edicts are the norm. Couple this with the constant squeezing of Labor to optimize P&Ls and you have a completely disenfranchised workforce doing what they must to survive.
Who needs people...
It turns out that those stupid motivational posters aren't wrong. People are our greatest asset. All resilience to date has come from people. Robustness is the domain of machines. As we erode the agency and willingness of folks doing the work to help shape direction, we lose the ability to nudge outputs towards RealValue:tm:. Some argue that LLMs change this. I'd argue that Ashby's Law holds and hallucination is going to bite far before a model of the world will fit in memory. In fact, I'd argue that AI fervor is a case in point.
There is real utility in LLMs; I'm not a Luddite. However, no one in the Capitalist class seems to be serious about considering total costs. Not really a change, I suppose. What's different is that the total cost in this case will come due well before the subprime asset can be dumped. It only takes one security incident or long-term outage to cripple valuation. I can tell you from lived experience that there is no nuanced conversation about this. You're for the Capitalist fantasy of disempowered Labor or you're out.
"Now, I'm not saying they don't want you to go out there and inspect a job. You know, they do," Dean told NPR. "But if you make too much trouble, you will get the Josh treatment. You will get what happened to me."
Dean was fired in April of last year — in retaliation, he said, for flagging improperly drilled holes in fuselages.
"I think they were sending out a message to anybody else," Dean said. "If you are too loud, we will silence you."
NPR
Ultimately,
This damn-the-consequences AI rollout is effecively the same as what's come before; it's just happening at a dramatically accelerated pace. The lust for wealth and power coupled with supreme naïveté is driving decisions that the folks at the bottom are nearly uniformly concerned about to one degree or another. My hope is that we suffer isolated crashes that clearly tell the story of risk before we crash it all. With the Magnificent Seven's percentage of the S&P 500 sitting at 32.6% as of writing, and our industrial base in shambles due to MBA'ification, that ship may have sailed.