Repeat labor is inefficient. Doing the work that another company has already done is wasted time, why not steal their technology instead? Oh that's illegal and we might actually get caught now? Shit.
Well, fuck- someone knows how to make wireless earphones with VR projections work. If it can exist, then with enough all-in-one monkey-typewriter packages, you can build it. No need to hire a person to figure out how to do something which already exists, the AI can reverse engineer it! Right?
Duplicate work is only a real problem under capitalism. It's spending limited resources as if you are the only one working on a project to retrace the steps of those silenced by non-compete clauses. A purely invented problem, caused by isolating laborers from one another and keeping them in check with an indirect reward for their cause: capital with variant value and the ability to suddenly be revoked.
AI 'efficiency' is all about reducing redundancies: if it can be done already it can be done sooner. An executive sitting in an office chair planning meetings for core financiers cannot see the hours and weeks and months of not just work, but thinking and plotting and waiting for manufacturing to get back to you. All of that is just as black-boxed as an algorithm to someone who has never had to solve engineering problems in any way other than 'add a decimal place'.
If you treat humans like AI, then it's natural to take the real thing when offered. Any issues that come up with the tech will be worked out by tech we buy in the future, and after that- well, by then we'll have cut and sold to Ycombinator.
The fewer people who are left to fall, the more material to stitch a parachute of gold: now, do we have a machine that knows how to repair the sewing machine?
