Ha, yeah, we could write essay after essay and still have plenty left to say. There needs to be something akin to a social contract between employer and employee. Are labour unions very active/influential there? Collective bargaining agreements are about as close as we come to that here in the US but the unions have been declining for a long time and union jobs are few and far between these days. The union jobs I've worked have been much better in terms of treating people decently. The Company still sucked but you knew that there was always means of redress.
I can't shake the feeling that with AI and technology more generally, we're at the beginning of the digital equivalent of the Industrial Revolution and we're headed for big changes come hell or high water. Probably be a mixed bag of good and bad but we could easily reach a point where most people don't have to work and that's going to be one hell of a reckoning all on its own.
On a vaguely leadership related note, are you familiar with Auftragstaktik?
I am, mission-type tactics. It's a really interesting leadership strategy although (I believe) it can fail if the unit does not contain the right people it would probably end in disaster in some case but with highly trained and motivated units it can bring great success. I'm sure there's many cases of it having failed but also many in which the faster decision-making process in the field has brought stunning results - it worked really well for the Germans.
The technique, in a business environment, can also work really well but due to the lack of military it's often critical for leaders to make the objectives very clear, and the parameters also...also critical for the unit/team to understand the repercussions of failure which makes it problematic because, in business, lives rarely rely on the objective being attained, just jobs.
I agree with the AI thing, I think it's going to be an interesting time, but I'll admit to not seeing a lot of positives coming from it generally.