Yes and Facebook probably has about as many contractors as they do FTEs, but that number fluctuates without making the news…meaning total effective payroll at Facebook is extremely shadowy

The tech companies such as Meta that pay good wages and have good working conditions are able to do so because they are exceptionally efficient and require a relatively low number of employees to generate the outsize profits they do.

So that “dystopia” can already be considered to be here.

You might be interested in these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdIvnIUw0tE

Not sure whether this is more common in the US these days. I know for a fact that a lot of buildings in China are constructed this way.

No, they get the 200m yachts for building the capability first. There will come a time on our trajectory that artificial scarcity is such an obvious canard that we will move past it into a post scarcity world. I don’t know how it’ll be constructed, but the need to work being a moral imperative will necessarily fall away as it becomes obvious it’s not necessary nor imperative nor moral. I think this is unavoidable, sans some sort of plateau or limiting factor or regression, and the rate of change I see makes it look like we aren’t far away - although the realization of that the wizard is just a man behind the curtain may be.