Autonomous AI Companies as a Footnote

In an AI guide, there’s a sentence that casually describes the abolition of human labor. It reads like a feature. Soon, autonomous AI companies that operate without human involvement.

I read the sentence twice. Not because it was complicated. But because I couldn’t believe it was just sitting there. Without comment. Without context. Without a single word about what that means.

Imagine someone writes a text about urban planning and mentions in passing that cities will soon no longer need residents. And then moves on to the next paragraph. Lighting concepts. Parking management.

That’s what this reads like.

A company without people. No CEO. No clerk. No cafeteria cook. A legal entity that makes decisions, signs contracts, earns money, and where not a single person gets up in the morning to go to work. This isn’t the next level of automation. This is the end of the idea that business has something to do with people.

It’s presented as a possibility. An outlook. Something to keep an eye on. The way you keep an eye on the weather. Might rain. Might not. We’ll see.

In thirty years I’ve heard a lot of technology promises. Cloud will change everything. Mobile will change everything. Blockchain will change everything. Most of the time, less changed than announced. But sometimes more changed than announced, and it happened quietly, and the people it affected only noticed when it was too late.

What bothers me isn’t the prediction. Maybe it’s right. Maybe not. What bothers me is the tone. An autonomous AI company is described like a new operating system. An upgrade. You install it, and then everything runs better. The question of who it runs better for is never asked.

For the owner of the company who no longer pays salaries, it runs better. For the investor who no longer has personnel risks, it runs better. For the machine, nothing runs at all, because machines don’t feel anything. And for the people who worked in the old version of that company, nothing runs anymore. Because they no longer appear.

This is the architecture that occupies me about the entire AI debate. Big shifts are written small. The existential becomes technical. Human consequences are footnotes in a text about efficiency.

I wonder whether the people writing these texts notice it themselves. Or whether the logic of optimization has become so natural that you no longer see what you’re saying. If the goal is efficiency, then the human being is a cost factor. And eliminating the cost factor isn’t an ethical problem but a technical one. You solve it, and then you move on.

This way of thinking isn’t evil. It doesn’t think in those categories. It thinks in possibilities, in potentials, in use cases. But that’s exactly the problem. There are sentences you don’t get to write casually. Sentences that need to stop. That need a pause. That force the reader to close the text for a moment and think.

Soon, autonomous AI companies that operate without human involvement. That is one of those sentences.

It would have needed its own chapter. It got a subordinate clause.