"they should not have had 12,000 to begin with"

Nailed it

And every other civilized society except America builds internal power structures that inhibit violent self-centeredism. Maybe it's time we do the same?

Some of the money is spent. What happens when better models, more efficient cooling techniques, and other technologies hit? Seems like the best strategy at this point isn't dumping your entire FCF into datacenters, but wait and see if there's even a viable business efficiency improvement first.

I mean you're half right. Companies seek to automate some of their transactional labor and reduce their overall head count, but they also want a pool of low paid labor to rotate when they do layoffs, which are usually focused on the highest paid slices of the labor chain.

There's a couple issue with LLMs. The first is that by structure they make a lot of mistakes and any work they do must be verified, which sometimes takes longer than the actual work itself, and this is especially true in compliance or legal contexts. The second is the cost. If a company has a choice to outsource transactional labor to Asia for $3 an hour or spend millions on AI tokens, they will pick Asia every single time. The first constraint will never be overcome. The second has to be overcome before AI even becomes a relevant choice, and the opposite is actually happening. $ per kwh is not scaling like expected.

My prediction is that LLMs will replace some entry level positions where it makes sense, but the vast majority of the labor pool will not be affected. Rather, AI might become a tool for humans to use in certain specific contexts.

The issue with framing this as a resurrection of the productivity paradox is that AI had never even theoretically increased productivity.

I think in retrospect it's going to look very silly.