But I think there’s an important psychological dimension to this: bosses are especially easy to trick with AI when they’re being asked to believe that they can use AI to fire workers who are in a position to tell them to fuck off.

… What a relief it would be to fire everyone who is professionally required to tell you to fuck off when you want them to do stupid and/or dangerous things …

This also explains why media bosses are so anxious to fire screenwriters and actors and replace them with AI. … The difference is that the writers will call you a clueless fucking suit and demand that you go back to your spreadsheets and stop bothering them while they’re trying to make a movie, whereas the chatbot will cheerfully shit out a (terrible) script to spec. The fact that the script will suck is less important than the fact that swapping writers for LLMs will let studio bosses escape ego-shattering conflicts with empowered workers who actually know how to do things.

It also explains why bosses are so anxious to replace programmers with chatbots. … Tech companies had business-wide engineering meetings where techies were allowed to tell their bosses that they thought their technical and business strategies were stupid.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/20/i-would-prefer-not-to/