This article read like a conspiracy theory, and it offers no evidence for its position. It's not even really making a case. It's just stating that companies are putting money behind AI so that they can lay off employees and reduce the quality of their products, and by saying that they apparently think they've made an argument.
When I've talked to startup CEOs or execs building AI products at larger companies, their sales pitch is usually some form of:
"Right now X is expensive because you have to hire people to do it. That means that access to X is limited. By using AI, we can provide more access to X".
X could be anything from some aspect of healthcare, to some type of business service, or even something in the arts.
It's very clear that the people building AI companies, and the people investing in those companies, think that there is an enormous market to use AI to automate a wide variety of work that currently requires human labor. They may not be explicitly framing it as "we get to reduce our payroll by 50%" - they may be framing it as "now everyone in the world will get access to X" (often tech executives will use a grand mission to justify horrible things), but the upshot is that companies are 100% putting money behind AI because they believe it will help them get more work out of fewer and fewer people.
I would say "works as designed" - efficiency gains add shareholder value which is what most orgs optimize for. Pitching these makes sense. As usual, the costs of second order effects are externalized.
