I think the capital vs labor structure here obscures the most interesting dynamics going on. I mean, sure there are a bunch of greedy execs that would love to reduce head count and are pretty out of touch so that they have a high degree of not really knowing or caring about the people on the front lines while also not really understanding what they do or if it even can be replaced. This is the same story since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and probably well before that.

But one of the things I find interesting at the ground level is that AI can be incredibly empowering to individuals on the front lines, because suddenly one person can run down code, data, logs, and other tedious scope to cut through layers of bureaucracy that served no real purpose except to manage human bandwidth constraints. Now obviously this is not a panacea, it doesn't work everywhere, can be disruptive, lead to new ambiguities, etc. It's too early to see how it will actually pan out once model capabilities and human ways of working stabilize, and I'm sympathetic to the anxiety this produces. But my point is, bad management notwithstanding, modern AI tends to be most empowering to software engineers and other detail-oriented people, and I don't see this changing any time soon.