What if AI just makes us work harder?

its pretty clear that especially because AI have become worker-level tools that the negative externalities are passed to the consumer (worker). This means that we will be expected to keep up with an increasing pace of work because johnson in the cubicle next door is pumping out tons.

and better yet for the corporate overlord, the worker becomes more replaceable as well. their knowledge is less valuable and their overall skill is also less. they are in a sort of perpetual race to the bottom where they are just the meat monkey in the loop that is only valuable for keeping their agent(s) on task.

profits go up but the company knows in their darkest nights that they are also easily replaced. all of capitalism is just a house of cards waiting for the next model to pull the final card out from beneath us and then there will be truly nothing left except a handful of frontier ai companies who are fully integrated with government powers for all 'lawful purposes.'

the riots in the streets are easily quelled without a human in the loop.

Yeah, when I used to play CS it was incredible how much time you could "accidentally" spend on it. The commitment per round is so low you just end up having "one more game" over and over again. It's what I've found with coding agents except it's "one more feature". There's less thought going into what is worth doing and what isn't, so you the up doing more in the long run.