Consumer limits. When something is good enough to generate stable profit, there is no real incentive to innovate beyond the bare minimum; just enough to keep consumers engaged, shareholders satisfied, and regulators at bay.
This is how modern capitalism operates. We keep receiving new version numbers without any meaningful change — consumers keep updating their subscriptions out of habit — xyzAI PR managers, HR managers, corporate lawyers, and countless other bureaucrats keep collecting their paychecks, secretly dreaming of retirement. Meanwhile, xyzAI's top management burns money on endless acquisitions just to fight boredom, gradually morphing into xyz(ai)MEGAcorp, a monolith dabbling in everything from crude oil processing and styrofoam cups to web services and AI models.
No modern megacorporation is capable of creating anything fundamentally new beyond what worked for them once. Universal welfare and prosperity could have been achieved 60 years ago, but that would have disrupted the cycle. Instead, we got planned obsolescence, endless subscription models, and a world where everything “new” is just a slightly repackaged version of last year’s product.
This is how modern capitalism operates. We keep receiving new version numbers without any meaningful change — consumers keep updating their subscriptions out of habit — xyzAI PR managers, HR managers, corporate lawyers, and countless other bureaucrats keep collecting their paychecks, secretly dreaming of retirement. Meanwhile, xyzAI's top management burns money on endless acquisitions just to fight boredom, gradually morphing into xyz(ai)MEGAcorp, a monolith dabbling in everything from crude oil processing and styrofoam cups to web services and AI models.
No modern megacorporation is capable of creating anything fundamentally new beyond what worked for them once. Universal welfare and prosperity could have been achieved 60 years ago, but that would have disrupted the cycle. Instead, we got planned obsolescence, endless subscription models, and a world where everything “new” is just a slightly repackaged version of last year’s product.