Predation Transposed to the Disruptive AI Will Benefit No One
The manifest effects of capturing the surplus production enabled by automation, language models, and their forced adoption into the economic model are measurable in both figures and flesh.
From acceleration to exhaustion, only a few months will have passed — the inflection point dating from the remarkable moment when the inclusion of agents in IDEs became commoditized, transforming the average developer into a vertical factory, and temporal and qualitative values were compressed by a factor of 10 to 100 units.
The industrialization of the means of production and their appropriation, as has been customary since industry existed, has been accompanied by an unprecedented social dumping in that it strikes a new underclass of workers.
Gone are the days — though so recent — when the "10x" developer dictated his own rules and salary. He has been silenced, effortlessly surpassed by another who is less concerned with the quality of what he produces, acquiescing to the slightest request, however poorly formulated, a simple relay-multiplier of "product" requirements imagined on the fly with no ethics or even consideration for security, technical debt, or environmental ethics. For all these aspects are impacted, at scales that apparently no one wishes to measure. And yet there are measures to be taken.
The trend would therefore be to push the boundaries of sustainability by relying on an ever-present and growing production capacity. But what exactly are we producing? Where is this acceleration heading? For if every vector has a starting point, a direction, and a force, the equation remains uncertain today because we do not have all the variables. Let us observe what is observable and develop some projections.
Sources OptimaEurope
If the analyses are to be believed, the rational scenario tends toward these conclusions: Evidence of a structural inflection in the European developer market — after a phase of salary progression linked to tech tension up to 2022 — junior salaries are entering a plateau logic, or even a slight erosion in real terms, around €40–42k gross per year:
- a combination of a slowdown in recruitment
- an abundant junior supply and the progressive automation of entry-level tasks by AI tools.
Conversely, senior profiles would retain a moderate upward trajectory, from around €60k today toward approximately €67k by 2036 in the central scenario, as value would shift toward the capacity to frame, secure, integrate, and deliver complex systems.
For a CIO, the operational message should be clear: not to mechanically reduce developer headcount, but to reconfigure the skills pyramid — by limiting the recruitment of non-augmented juniors, accelerating their move toward autonomy via AI, and securing senior profiles capable of orchestrating architectures, software quality, and the productivity of tooled-up teams.
Yet the observation that can already be made in the friction dynamics between executive and operational levels (particularly HR) is that this balance and calibration of skills is not being respected, and that the pressure on Dev teams and the labor market is already at its peak — while at the same time, framing capacities are being short-circuited by management teams as sparing with their time as with their budgets, dreaming of omnipotence since they too are doped on synthetic intelligence. Disconnection.
This is evidenced by the profusion of senior profiles struggling to find assignments, the impossibility for juniors to access the labor market under bearable conditions, the inflation of half-finished products, and the rampant structural security vulnerabilities.
On the product side, we create disposable goods, instant deployments, betting on 100 projects to retain just one that is bankable. Pure capitalist logic that leaves a trail of dust and bitterness behind it, because trust erodes faster than it is built.
Qualitatively, several pitfalls have shattered the dreamed trajectory of the vibe-coder in a trance; Security, as we have just seen, eroded trust, stagnant salaries — but above all, and this is what should worry CIOs, it is the instability of the AI supply chain.
Between the fluctuating but never-zero hallucination rate of GPT 5.X, the token outages at Anthropic which caps its infrastructure under the pressure of insatiable demand, the stratospheric cost of on-premise porting which is bleeding dry the few players who can afford it (when they can find and are willing to pay engineers to develop the infrastructure), the ever-growing appeal of Asian brokers at the price of sacrificing all sovereignty and real governance — it is hard to navigate and lay the foundations of a sustainable, industrial-scale model.
Even public actors, who should be those we turn to when it comes to planning and guaranteeing security, have failed to find their footing and are scattering themselves between reassuring but groundless declarations, confused initiatives, and constant reorganization.
Energetically, it is the unknown. We know the appetite of the infrastructures, we measure our fragility in the face of energy prices and their growing scarcity (war, resources, absurd margins, deregulated players) — but we sidestep the question in the most irresponsible way, putting off until tomorrow what should have been undertaken 20 years ago. No visibility or sign of investment in what once constituted the tip of France's industrial spear — namely its civilian nuclear capacity.
According to forecasts from the International Energy Agency, global electricity consumption by these infrastructures is expected to more than double by 2030, reaching approximately 945 TWh — roughly equivalent to Japan's current consumption. — L'usine Nouvelle, 2025
But there is no doubt that Bruno Lemaire has a completely beside-the-point answer on the matter!
At the end of this analysis, one conclusion imposes itself in all its starkness: artificial intelligence, as it is being deployed today, does not enrich our societies — it impoverishes them. First, an impoverishment of economic value, drowned under a flood of automated content and services that are often worth only the noise they generate. When production happens without effort, without scarcity, and without grounding in human know-how, the price tends toward zero and exchange loses its meaning. The creative economy unravels in a race to mediocrity, where abundance conceals a net loss of value for the vast majority.
To this is added an inflation of code as spectacular as it is alarming: increasingly obese systems, written or generated in a logic of saturation, where the essential is diluted in layers of useless abstractions. This code does not build a more sober or more efficient future; it burdens our infrastructures, exhausts our resources, and renders our tools ever more opaque — even to those who produce them.
But perhaps the most serious symptom is the disconnection from reality. AI locks us into a self-referential loop, where models train on their own artifacts, where language becomes standardized, where decisions are made on the basis of correlations uprooted from any lived experience. It is not the world that the machine models, but a statistical caricature of the world, gradually confused with reality itself.
So who truly benefits from this headlong rush? Neither the workers, whose skills are devalued before being captured. Nor the citizens, faced with an increasingly toxic information environment. Nor even the companies, trapped in a technological arms race where competitive advantage evaporates as soon as it is acquired. AI will benefit no one, except a system that feeds on its own expansion while eroding the material, economic, and cognitive foundations of common life. The urgency is no longer to accelerate, but to regain our footing.
This article was written by a human, assisted by a few digital tools. Not the other way around.
JAS for 199A Consulting - May 2026
