There are certainly those kind of irrational AI boosters out there. Though I strongly suspect the AI bubble is much like the crypto bubble, in that the true believers are vastly outweighed by fakers who don’t believe their own bullshit and are just hyping the product to make money.

When it comes to the billionaire caste, though, I think most of them know AI isn’t, and probably won’t, live up to the hype.

But the point isn’t to actually replace people with AI.

The point is to replace free people with serfs.

We’re already seeing AI being used as an excuse to replace American workers with foreign workers overseas. That is to say, American companies fire a bunch of well-paid American software engineers, “replace” them with AI tools, and then when the tools inevitably fail, hire much cheaper labor from India.

And the techbro support of Trump’s immigration crackdown has the same goal. They don’t want to bring foreign workers to the United States and pay them salaries sufficient to live in the United States - they want their workers trapped in countries with low wages and low cost of living.

Now expand that to, basically, every other working class sphere of employment. AI can’t replace workers. But if enough businesses can be convinced to fire workers and try to replace them with AI, we will get mass unemployment, economic collapse, and political turmoil - and, as always in a collapse, the ultra-rich will get even richer, because the unemployed working class will be forced to sell whatever they have at fire sale prices, and the billionaire caste will be able to buy up land and houses and businesses cheap, and consolidate even more wealth in their caste.

And when the dust settles, the unemployed masses will be desperate to work at whatever wage and conditions the billionaire caste wants to set.

I mean yeah they’re management.

I don’t think it’s crazy to think that a fair bit of work, like driving, weeding, harvesting vegetables, and the likes can be replaced by automation today when it couldn’t a decade ago.