Organizations are choosing to eliminate workers rather than amplify them with AI because they'd rather own 100% of diminished capacity than share proceeds from exponentially increased capacity. That's the rent extraction model consuming its own productive infrastructure.
The Stanford study documents organizations systematically choosing inferior economic strategies because their rent-extraction frameworks cannot conceptualize workers as productive assets to amplify.
This reveals that these organizations are economic rent-seekers that happen to have productive workers, not production companies that happen to extract rents. When forced to choose between preserving rent extraction structures or maximizing value creation, they preserve extraction even at the cost of destroying productive capacity. So what comes next?
I hope AI fuels a re-independence of many industries by making business software discovery and integration cheap and easy, every plumber with more than 10 years experience should own their company with low cost software running it, the efficiency gains from consolidating resources a la private equity for marketing and book keeping go away in an AI powered world