The C-levels already view programmers as interchangeable cogs. They only flourish because of startup culture that expects semi-equitable distribution of profits on a low overhead business activity. Outside that bubble it's already a job with poor advancement opportunities.

Yeah, but it's only possible because we, the software engineers, make it so. We could as a collective refuse to work on AI but we won't because it's a pretty, shiny, object with far too much lure for us to resist.

That's not it

We've proactively organized our economy to produce these kinds of hostile outcomes. It's not the technology that's the problem, it's the unquestioned assumptions of how we've collectively presumed it will be used.

We could build things for the collective benefit of humanity but that concept is extraordinarily foreign to us. We've become all Hayek, all the way down and these are the consequences; where all forms of progress can only be imagined as new forms of abuse and enslavement.

That's how it fuels reactionary conservatism. Everything is privatized so these exciting scientific breakthroughs can only be seen through a lens of hierarchy and property and the autocratic despotism that comes with that.

We could break that cycle any time...

"It's not the technology that's the problem, it's the unquestioned assumptions of how we've collectively presumed it will be used."

Yes, our imagination is bound by the belief systems we are trapped in. We choose possession of plastic widgets with built-in planned obsolescence over giving poor people a cancer treatment.

It is collective behavior driven by belief. Public access to education would benefit all of us, but we don't do that because of some doctrines. Point is that what we leave unquestioned by believing it is just rational, blinds us.

When we will start to rationally and empathically examine our collective memes, we might allow ourselves a better future.

As if collective action problems were so simple.

The reality is engineers need money but they prefer manipulating machines to people, so the business people take care of the unpleasant wetware programming and not coincidentally take the bulk of the profits.

it'd be far easier for a smaller group of engineers to build an AI powered CEO/C-suite that generates the regulatory filings etc. but does all human interaction over zoom or by phone. This would require a bit of work to pull off and would probably be denounced as horribly illegal, but I'm not convinced it would do a worse job than the median C-suite.

No, I don't think it is simple. In fact I think it is impossible. Just looking at the division in this thread tells me that there will never even be an agreement for taking such a stand much less follow through.

Yeah it's definitely not new, Marx called the process proletarianization.