

“AI” is just pattern recognition and reproduction models. They routinely fail at basic tasks. It is like having an incompetent junior dev that you have to watch like a hawk because not only do they write bad code, they routinely steal it from copyrighted sources. It helps bad coders pretend to be good ones because their code follows a popular pattern but it is often the wrong pattern for solving the problem - a problem they didn’t actually think about because they thought “AI” would solve it.
The real business case for LLMs in tech is as a propaganda tool for disciplining labor. Tech labor is in demand and therefore expensive. Executives and managers would like to decrease those wages and “AI” provides a rhetorical means by which to do so, including justifying rounds of firings. Productivity will crash because they are literally just layoffs to make higher profits, not because tasks have been automated.
This aligns with the general expectation of a market crash, which has been brewing for years and is now being more or less intentionally created. The big companies are building up “war chests” so that they can scoop up companies that fail and increase their monopolies during the later bailout period.
Costco is the latter but it’s a grocery store so their mechanisms are limited. Here’s a Costco union busting just a few days ago: https://dailyiowan.com/2025/03/30/workers-accuse-coralville-costco-of-union-busting/
Also you should accept that every company with a union wants it gone and is trying to find ways to kill it. Hire more staff to non-union positions, shrink union positions, delay contract negotiations, close unionized shops preferentially, buy off union leadership with perks/collaborationism. Many a petite bourgeoisie has shuttered their union shop citing financial problems only to reopen a few months later, suddenly union-free. And of course, slowly whittling away union sentiment and pushing a decert.