What's dystopian is that a company like google will fight tooth and nail to remain the sole owner and rights holder to such a tech. A technology that should be made accessible outside the confines of capitalist motives. Such technologies have the potential to lift entire populations out of poverty. Not to mention that they could mitigate global warming considerably. It is simply not in the interest of humanity to allow one or more companies to hold a monopoly over such technology

Let's not? I think we've had enough robots with AI for now. Thank you.

The problem is the cost of each. Right now material is dirt cheap and energy prices are going up. And we are not good at long term planning.

This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in. The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025. What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven't existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities... ... But this process also involves laying off 500 of the 'least productive' or 'least mission critical' employees. So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses. Generally corpos call this something like 'right-sizing' or 'refocusing' or something like that. ... But of course... anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this... will tell you roughly this is what happens: Turns out all those 'grunts' you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of... because middle management doesn't acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management. Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified apartments... but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new. So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed... which is no longer being done, which is not documented.... and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did... So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess. ... Now, this 'right sizing' is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups... and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent. Here's Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/

It's a shame. AI has potential but most people just want to exploit its development for their own gain.