I really wonder if they don't understand that they change from a distributed dependence for labour to a single dependency for labour and what that means for their position in their eco system.

Dear boss, 50 people won't strike or leave the company all at once for no reason at Monday 9:38am. Your ai overlords might decide change the terms of the contract randomly on a Monday morning and there is nothing you can do. You had effectively a crown and gave it away.

My company is not like that. They care about the employees. It's actually written in black and white in the company's charter: the purpose of the company is to do good by its employees and the community it operates in.

I've brought up my concerns about AI before and they've reacted: they invested in machines capable of running models locally for the engineers (I have one on my desk) and they formed a committee on AI safety and building local infrastructure to untie ourselves from the big cloud AI providers.

My company is one of a rare few such companies. Most other employers are like yours. Yet as good as mine is, AI is like cocaine to those who use it and to the bean counters: they know it's bad but they just can't stop.

No idea why they would ignore such direct existential danger for their companies.

Risk Management (that's what they named the LLM after they fired the people responsible for that) is probably telling them that there will be a huge pool of willing applicants to work for less money than the people they let go, that talent is fungible, etc.

The real fun part is when people start asking for hiring bonuses to come in and unfuck the company slop. They won't start trying to hire people until they start losing customers which means the quality of the product is lower than it was when they took on the customer. If it takes them longer to fix their codebase than it would for a competitor to start from scratch and outdo them on marketing or advertising, then they'll go under.