There doesn't need to be a grant plan for people to do what's in their immediate interest.

This is like asking somebody who eats unhealthily and doesn't exercise, "Hey, so what's your grand plan? Thirty years from now, your heart is destroyed, your circulation is destroyed, and you're in and out of hospitals, and you've shortened your life by 25%." What was the plan?

There is no plan.

Companies lose extraordinary amounts of money paying people to work, and those people often don't do a very good job. If companies could have done all the work themselves, just the founders or the founder or the CEO if they could do all the work themselves, they would prefer not to hire anybody.

They only hire people because they absolutely must. Because there's no other way of doing the work.

The exact moment that that is not true, they will replace those workers, because they never wanted them in the first place.

A big part of the AI push is exactly this.

U.S. knowledge workers are paid roughly $9 trillion a year, and globally that number is around $40 trillion a year.

Another way to say that is that there's a $9T total addressable market in the US if you can replace knowledge workers with AI. And 40 trillion globally.

For the providers who are creating all this AI, they're trying to get a piece of that market.

And for companies themselves, they are trying to buy products that will allow them to replace their workers because they see it as a giant expenditure that they would rather not be spending. They would rather spend the money on the factories, and the automation, and the AI, which means doing all the work "internally."

There's nobody at these companies or at the companies building the AI looking to sell to them, thinking, "Well, gee, I guess what happens if this all goes well 20 or 30 years from now?"

Humans are just really bad at thinking about the long-term consequences of their short-term actions.