Humans have no way to compete with what's happening.
Because if it's like outsourcing, then just like Japan and South Korea, over time China has transformed from "the cheap labor with low inconsistent quality" into the world's engineering hub which surpasses everything domestic in price, scale and quality... all three at the same time. The only reason companies try to diversify right now is because China is becoming ambitious and too powerful, and in case of a US-China conflict, they don't want to be left cut off from all their factories.
So if outsourcing to AI is like outsourcing to China, then we know where things are headed as well. Except faster.
People (probably not the same people) are still resisting this with remote work, but get all excited when it is about AI. Humans are strange.
AI doesn't slack when you're not looking at it. While humans do. And teams need tightly knit communication so they can avoid misunderstandings and synchronize together.
So. Shared working spaces optimizes the performance of humans, while AI has no physical existence, but its shared working space is feeding it 50MB file of text holding your entire project history. That's the AI office. Much cheaper.
I have had a different experience.
Some humans slack while nobody is looking; some humans slack even if you look; some humans do not slack. Alternatively, as long as you can measure the output, does it matter if someone slacks?
But let's say humans may and I can live with it, because it is not a thread about remote work.
The strangeness/inconsistency comes from (it would seem) not considering those factors in a business decision regarding humans, but to consider them in a business decision regarding AI.
You mirror this inconsistency in your argument, mentioning the savings of amenities and office rental _only_ in the case of AI. This is not a criticism, but I find this interesting, because I always see this topic expressed in this exact same way.