> This reveals that these organizations are economic rent-seekers that happen to have productive workers, not production companies that happen to extract rents.
Your perspective is so contrary to reality I'm actually not sure if you're trolling or not. There is no such thing as pure value creation. In order for labor to create value, it must be aligned with the company's value proposition, i.e. what convinces customers to pay for the value that the company provides. Half the people off in the corner building something that they think is valuable are actually building something that customers do not care about, won't pay more for, and increase the company's maintenance burden.
Keeping labor aligned with value creation is the whole game. If it wasn't, then all these rent-seeking-first enterprises would have fired their layers and layers of middle management a long time ago; the company needs to pay them a salary (reducing profits) but they don't write any code / "produce any value". All these massive corporations would have moved to a flat management hierarchy a long time ago, if labor was truly capable of aligning itself to improving value generation; and if you think there's some nefarious/conspiratorial reason why massive corporations don't do that, then most of them would have been out-competed a long time ago by co-ops with flat management hierarchies that could produce the same value at a lower price due to lower administration costs.
Needing to hire employees is a necessary evil for businesses. Aligning employees is hard. Motivating employees is hard. Communication is hard. Businesses do not exist to provide people with jobs, which are created out of sheer necessity, and are destroyed when that necessity goes away.
You got there in the end. Hiring people is a necessary evil and ai allows companies to massive reduce the necessity of that evil. Having done budgeting and forecasting for a wide range or organizations companies will do anything to avoid hiring an employee. I’ve seen companies spend 3x what an employee would cost just to avoid the increased headcount.
The forces of capital do not want to share a single penny and are solely focused on getting to a place of rent.