The dead economy theory

> businesses will continue to need humans to differentiate.

Honestly, why? If AI actually becomes capable of replacing large sections of the workforce, why wouldn’t a business composed entirely of AI “employees” outcompete their rivals?

"The dead economy is one where plenty happens and none of it requires you. Where the productive capacity of civilization has been captured by a system you have no stake in, no input into, and no vote on. Where the people who built it told you they don’t think you should have a say. Where they express alarm about the consequences in private and optimism in public. Where they publish white papers calling for radical redistribution while funding super PACs to destroy the politicians who propose it."

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Social control is foundational in human societies. Religions once told the poor that they would be rewarded in the afterlife for a lifetime of hard work and obedience to princes. Now politicians tell us to venerate billionaires for the jobs they create the the social programs their taxes fund. Produce. Consume. Obey.

If billionaires automate away all the jobs, dodge their taxes, and prevent politicians from picking up the slack with redistributive social programs, social control will break down. No sane billionaire should want to find out what that will be like.

> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger?

The technical and organizational framework they operate under is so complex and full of jank that developer velocity slows to a crawl whenever a new feature comes down the pike. It's easier to throw a new pod of nerds at the problem than retask, and the reason they come in a pod is that there's nothing in the job long-term for anyone with the sort of intelligence they're asking for.

From my perspective, Twitter was a question of how many people you need to keep the lights on at an organization with low data rate/value. Musk could kill any non-devops department or project he wanted to because a social media company just doesn't have that many existential situations.

The people you know who love it, love it. How many times have you seen a retired age person working? It’s not always because they require it financially. I worked with a gentleman from Bulgaria when I was young who worked 70 hours a week because he was immensely bored otherwise and work brought him purpose. When you become adjusted to working all the time, the work becomes the purpose, and not working becomes death. I watched this happen with one of my grandparents. He retired and died of a heart attack within a year. All signs pointed to him living longer had he not retired. My point is that freedom to some people is work, because work is their purpose and having a purpose provides freedom to enjoy other things.

> Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?

I don't think it's a matter of oversupply, it's a matter of allocation of resources. Are there more developers than what there would need to be in a hypothetically optimal allocation of headcount? Yes

Say you have X billions of dollars to spend on headcount. How do you determine where to put people such that the money is allocated efficiently and people are working on the right things? How do you make sure that the money gets used efficiently? It's in the billions, you don't have time to do this. So you have to delegate, which leads to managers gaming the system.

In smaller companies, it's easier to determine this because things are still simple enough for the top-level leadership to have some idea.

As the company gets bigger, more bad actors enter, there is more fabrication and empire building trying to frame where the headcount is "needed". Bigger companies handle this differently. Maybe they just get slower and pay less. Or maybe they do more layoffs. Moving people around internally is too complicated for the VPs, it's easier to just cut and hire later.

Why does software have this problem specifically? Idk, maybe it occurs in other places. But at least in the case of software, the systems become very specialized and it's hard to really figure out what matters and what doesn't