But we were talking about corporations and industries, not humans. The industry and whichever company you work for, unless it's a small 10 person shop where you sit across from the CEO, doesn't see you as an investment and never has. It sees you as a necessary evil.

The original statement I replied to was that the industry has changed, as employees "used to be seen as an investment", not an expense. But I guarantee, not a single person on the financial side of a company of any real size has ever seen employees' salaries as anything other than an operating expense and companies HATE operating expenses.

My freshman year of university, we had an intro course where every week we'd just have a different person in the industry come talk to us about something or other. Very general, no specific subject. C-level exec at one of the best known software companies in the country started his lecture by saying that developers are overpaid, it's ridiculous, and all of society would benefit if we weren't so overpaid. We should train more engineers than needed so companies can start paying less.

Out of the big famous software companies in this country, that one is actually seen as one of the better places to work. This wasn't even some out of touch MBA, this is a person who had started out as a developer, became a research fellow, and, crucially, 2 years before this lecture which took place in 2015, had become a shareholder of that particular company. So that's what, 13 years of being a regular employee (some of it spent as a dev, some of it as a researcher) vs 2 years of being a shareholder owning just over 10% of a medium sized software company aaaaaand look, suddenly your old coworkers are an expense to cut as soon as possible.

So no, companies have never seen our salaries as investments. The greed sets in once you see the number grow and realize it could grow even faster and at that point, everyone who works for you is an expense. It's a disease, and it's not new, it didn't start with AI. Before AI, it was just oursourcing to India to save money on salaries instead of investing in local talent.