I and I imagine a lot of other folks, don't believe the future of work should be a smaller group of executives commanding a larger system of people and machines. We have seen what AI can do not just to software product quality without guardrails, but to the junior and midlevel team members who are laid off or never hired at all in exchange for better profit rates with AI tokens vs human salaries.
That is just the old hierarchy with better software.
The history of work has always had this tension. You can go back to the start of US history and look at the military, commissioned officers were trained and trusted to command while enlisted service members carried out the work and risk. In the corporate and business world, executives and managers became the people who planned, measured, and optimized, while workers became the people being measured. Those structures were not only about class, but race and in America they were built inside a society already shaped by racism, classism, unequal education, unequal access to capital, and unequal access to leadership.
AI now forces us to confront that history again.
If we are not careful, AI will not flatten organizations. It will make the hierarchy invisible. Instead of a manager with a clipboard, we will have an algorithm. Instead of a foreman with a stopwatch, we will have dashboards, productivity scores, automated performance reviews, and AI systems that decide who gets opportunity and who gets replaced.
