[phantasmish]

The Professional Managerial Class (college -> management being the norm) gained a lot of steam in the '80s and had basically taken over the entire economy by the end of the '90s. My dad's career spanned the pre- and post-transition eras, with the latter coming as a very sudden shift due to a large merger. His description of the difference was... not flattering to the modern notion. Way, way more wasted time. Way more business trips that could have been an email (but how would the managers get to go party away from the family otherwise?). Lots more clueless management who don't understand WTF the business actually does or how any of it works, resulting in braindead leadership.

[no_wizard]

Deep professional understanding of a problem space that a business solves is way undervalued. Institutional knowledge, experience, and domain expertise have been devalued precisely because the managerial class (particularly executives and VPs) actively learn and live the idea that labor is always bad and to be minimized as much as possible.

This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets itself in this way "how AI can replace or minimize X role" as opposed to "This is how you can use AI to empower your workforce in the majority of discourse I've seen around it.

[dragonwriter]

> This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets itself in this way "how AI can replace or minimize X role" as opposed to "This is how you can use AI to empower your workforce in the majority of discourse I've seen around it.

Arguably, AI is largely marketed that way because that's what corporate buyers care about, the same way every productivity improving invention has been marketed to corporate buyers even if a major actual effect is increasing the value of each labor hour and driving wages up. (Which is largely isomorphic to reducing the number X role needed in the production of Y units of a good or service.)

Its also sold as a labor productivity increase to independent creators. And the two things are, after all, different sides of the same coin.

[nosianu]

> Arguably, AI is largely marketed that way because that's what corporate buyers care about

Why "arguably", that is exactly what he wrote

[dragonwriter]

No, he wrote that it was marketed that way because that is what the “AI boom is really about”, in opposition to something else, which I also discuss in the post you excerpted this from. Not sure if you didn’t read the whole post and just kneejerk reacted to the first part of the first sentence out of context, or if you just didn’t understand how it sharply differs from the claims in the post it responds to.

[no_wizard]

What is it really about, in contrast to what I assert? I'm looking at how its being implemented, talked about, thought about, introduced.

I'm happy to re-evaluate my stance in the light of better evidence, but the AI adoption has corresponded to alot of CEOs announcing layoffs with a simultaneous doubling down on AI tools to replace those now displaced workers or those LinkedIn stories from people saying how they will never have to hire X or Y because AI will do it / does it.

[elzbardico]

The System's purpose is what it does.

As capitalism moved towards financialization, the societal incentives moved from "profit from doing things" in the long run towards "profit from trading ownership of entities that eventually do things" in the short term.

This requires a completely different kind of management. I don't need someone who deeply knows what it takes to create and manufacture planes as a CEO anymore, I need someone who can make the most out of the numbers to make the speculators happy during this quarter.

[alephnerd]

> Professional Managerial Class (college -> management being the norm)

This isn't the norm in most STEM industries anymore.

Most of us started off as IC-level engineers before either beung given progressively more responsibility and/or being sponsored by our employees to participate in a PTMBA like Wharton, Booth, Fuqua, or Haas.

Networking and hustling did ofc play a role, but lacking domain experience would limit how high you could climb.