It does seem like a lot of the valuations and infrastructure investments for these companies only make sense if each one assumes they will be the first and only one to invent superintelligence and that it will largely replace all knowledge work.
i keep hearing this trope repeated ad nauseam cos people put no thought into it.
you only need people's money if you can't control their labor.
did a plantation owner in the 1600s need the money of his slaves ?
if you control a robot that can fight and take over land, enslave workers for things robots are bad at, harvest food, create buildings etc. what do you need other people for ?
your entertainment? robots can do that too.
(Source, worked for multiple tech companies that were laser focused on delighting customers until money people came in and ruined it, to the point they would prefer devs sit idle than work on things the MBAs didn’t have on a priority list).
what does having engineering credentials have to do with being a sociopath?
Sure, the guys focused on tech don't usually think with an empathy of a nurse (novadays not even nurses are guaranteed to be empathetic), but I know quite a few devs and IT people who are extremely pro-social.
It's the managerial, financial-oriented mindset that is the greatest predictor of sociopathic character.
The more power one has in an organization the more socio- and psycho-pathic they tend to be, simply because it's easier to get to the top if you are an amoral person, who is not holding back for any reason other than having power. That is why absolute power corrupts absolutely.
MBAs are bred to be sociopathic money-grabbers - I know that from experience.
I once made the mistake of going into an MBA program. On the very first lecture the lecturer asked each participant for his/her motivation for being there.
Most of them said 'money' and those who didn't were asked again until they caved-in and said 'money' as well or they were laughed out by the lecturer.
MBAs are expected to be sociopathic or you as a company shareholder won't be able to motivate them easily to do your bidding.
It's like public/private schooling, but worse - those programs are designed to create mindless drones for the institutions that use them for their own policy enforcement.
This is not a necessary end state. It is the byproduct of the disease of sociopathic MBAs.