You have your opinions on what the discussion should be, clearly other people have different opinions. Why should your opinion be weighted more highly than theirs?
I think you're viewing this from the perspective of someone who has a functioning brain and plentiful concepts and ideas that aren't being built because you're labour-constrained. Companies like Meta simply don't have productive uses for all of that human + AI labour. Meta spends tens of billions a year paying people to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. If the idea well you're going to is running dry, AI with a smaller number of humans can slop out the stuff you do want to build more efficiently is their implicit argument, especially when you don't care about quality (as is the case with Meta). Layoffs are also being used to tell a story around efficiency to investors while companies wait for the billions they're plowing in AI actually show profit.
Of course incumbents are going to be supportive of the system as it was and is, they're incumbents. You can't blame a person in power for maintaining a system giving them power any more than you can blame a bee for pollinating a flower. It's in their nature. The electorate misidentified the solution to their problems. Voters squarely hold the blame in my opinion. You can't vote for an arsonist and then complain when they set fire to everything. Leftists spend their time complaining online and disengaging from the political system instead of voting in primaries against incumbents. Independents and conservatives vote against their own interests consistently while keeping in power a party that is destroying our system of government.
Tech companies sitting on godlike amounts of money and being able to invest such huge sums in AI at a nascent stage is worrisome. There is absolutely nothing to indicate that this is anything close to an optimal distribution of investment in the economy. It's not a plus that some of these companies are playing an investment shell game. They don't hand out awards for badly timed investments, they hand out bankruptcy rulings. It's fine and good if a few speculative companies go bust. Nobody will think it's fine when companies ingrained into the fabric of the economy do. At the end of the day it's clear we've learned very little from previous crashes and I think it's a false assumption to think we'll suffer equivalently for it.
"Insanely useful" doesn't mean hundreds of billions of dollars of upfront investment from our largest corporations is prudent especially when proponents of AI don't seem to approach the risk honestly. The argument isn't just that AI is going to take over the world, it's that the consequences of massively over-investing in it could lead to a broader economic collapse more like the Great Depression than the Dot Com bubble. I'm not going to predict what might happen, but I don't think the Dot Com bubble is necessarily predictive of any outcome here, either.
We've raised, trained, hired and promoted generations of business people who push utter nonsense, understand nothing but optimizing for bad metrics, and orient solely around short term results. It's hard to look beyond modern corporate America when looking for causes of the fall in our living standards. This AI tokenmaxxing nonsense is just another rung on the same ladder to hell we've been on for decades.
The rich being in control of both sides does not make both sides equivalent when it comes to impacts on the commoner. The country is done for in large part because too many apathetic people are unable to discern very real differences in their political options, and instead of participating, you eject and poison the well on the way out which is exactly what the "rich" want you to do. You're not high-minded for your stance, you haven't figured out some secret, you're quite literally playing into their hand. Go vote in a Democratic primary and do something useful with yourself.
An indictment of the technology and the modern corporation. We're supposed to believe this technology is all-powerful and these corporations are efficient and innovative, by the way.
They play a game for a living. Their labor provides only indirect economic benefit in providing entertainment. They are also simply waiting to officially join the second group once they retire at a young age.
Late in replying to this, but just wanted to say I found this pretty compelling. I generally think people are too quick to assign to malice what could be assigned to incompetence. In this case I'm not convinced of that anymore especially given their public statements about these third-party harnesses. It does seem unavoidable that they'll have to move away from subscription-based pricing and towards token-based, but they're managing this in a really ham-fisted and user hostile way regardless.
Would imagine it's the simplest answer: they're flying by the seat of their pants, there's 1000 things happening every day that demand attention and there's not enough of it to go around. They toss their LLM at it, give it a cursory glance, and ship it. A quick glance at the Claude Code source code bears the result of this process out. The fundamental question is, if their model is so powerful, why do they keep fucking up such simple things? We're led to believe this is a serious company with a model so powerful they can't release it to the general public.
Surely there's a middle ground where improved APIs can be leveraged by both people and LLMs alike while keeping those APIs approachable? Why is it necessary that changing the python APIs would lead to "need[ing] LLMs for Blender"? I'm nowhere close to an AI maximalist but this criticism seems grounded in execution concerns. I'm definitely not saying that they won't mess this up and make the APIs overly complex, I just don't think that's necessarily going to be the case.
We should focus on effective means for change. Focusing external influence on low-level individuals with no decision making power might feel good but it has accomplished a sum total of nothing in the past. Why would we think it will make the situation better this time? They swap people in and out of projects all the time and it's really not disruptive at all. The only ways these tech behemoths have made any meaningful positive changes is through sustained governmental pressure either through oversight or regulation.
You'd also have some very large but currently unknowable number of people underfunding Medicare and Social Security but still expecting to be able to draw out of it when they're older and demanding they be allowed to do so when they're seniors.
Why should someone need to start a business just to have as good a life as their parents did? Why is today's wealth inequality optimal for society? Rich people in the past got by just fine. They started businesses, succeeded, lived incredibly comfortable lives, all while earning a smaller multiple more than the people working for them. The centralization of wealth is a sign of a sick society, especially when people who provide labor suffer and get less of the pie.
So let me get this straight, I save hundreds of dollars a month, I drive my cars "for free", I get paid at the end of my net-metering year, and somehow this is a bad deal because I've wanted (not needed) to wash my panels once? It sounds like you optimize your life around not maintaining the things around you which is fine, but I'd much rather save thousands of dollars.