The thesis of the book "Capitalist Realism" states the all encompassing nature of the economic system we live in bars the average person from being able to imagine a world outside that system.
Outside a profit motive, people still create and imagine new ideas. Profit motive in our current tech landscape is 80% innovation in selling ads. Basically a pointless expenditure of resources IMO. All we have is advertisement and war, with a sliver of toys to make our days easier. Outside of a profit-centric environment, there's reason to believe ideas can be explored on their own merit, not on their potential profit.
Do you think the comment to which I originally responded was a "thought experiment"? To me it sounded like another knee-jerk anti-capitalist response that ignores the realities of life today. It certainly wasn't a very practical response to the question of how one works in Operations without burning out. So read my response as a knee-jerk pro-capitalist response.
To be honest, it was annoyingly worded so I went with the thought experiment route. While I agree with what the user said, I try to convey my thoughts with a little more tact on the Venture-Capitalist forum.
I do think a post scarcity scenario would breath some life into a tech field that's been bloated with "because money" tech and solutions. Any interesting tech cannot be explored inquisitively without being useful for profit optimization. LLMs would be a really cool tech if the main usecase in our society wasn't "remove the human who does X better to save costs". An AI therapist will never be the solution, even if it was effective, IMO it shouldn't be the solution.
Back to the operations context, so much of the plight of the operations engineer is that teams shrink to reduce costs, take on more responsibility to reduce costs, and drive the operations engineer to an early grave to reduce costs. I firmly believe there should be room in society and the economy for a business to be considered a success without massive year over year growth, hell even static non-growth. Stability should be sought for certain aspects, and disrupted when the solution is actually improved, not just because its shiny.