In a company there are the CEO and other managers that are people. They should be charged and punished. In Italy the former CEO of an highway corporation, got a 12 year sentence for multiple manslaughter after a brige on a tollway in Geona collapsed, killing 43 people. Lack of maintenance was the main cause of the collapse, and they know it, because the engineer that designed the bridge in the 1960s found that being near the sea, corrosion of reinforced concrete was a problem. Maintenance was expensive and required to close the bridge, so it was skipped and made only on paper.

Induced demand works also for public transportation. In Italy there was a tiny station,Cervo basically was a passing loop for the single track line. For a lot of time few passenger trains stopped there and nobody was using that station, in the meantime there were works for doubling the railway and make a better one for freight trains, and the new tracks were built away from the existing track. Because the station at the time was used basically as a passing loop no corresponding station was designed on the new line.A couple of years before closing the track they changed the timetables of passenger trains, and every other hour, at the same minute two passenger trains stopped at the station. Tourists found it and they started to use the station, because there were trains stopping there regularly, because there was a nice beach at less than 300 m from the station, among other things. Then the track were closed and trains used the newer and faster tracks. Tourists went to other towns

Having only one person that isn't an expert in the field and involved because a relative it's ill it's a problem, because it could invest a lot of money in snake oil or unproven medical protocols, in this case very expensive medical protocols. Do you rembeber "Di Bella method" or "Stamina treatment"?

I notmally ride a vechicle that is driverless. The first version was available in Lille, France in 1983. It was deemed so safe that when maiden ride was made by at the time President fo France, FranÃois Miiterand.
These vehicles have a control panel hidden behind a locked panel, and a train driver with the correct key could open it and operate manually the vehicles.. If there's a power failure, there's also a diesel powered locomotive that could be used to tow the train cars
These safety measures are expensive and normally not used, but the engineers that designed the system thought about fringe cases and added them to cover them. On the other hand if one thing is designed as a demonstration system the safety is going to be less important if the boss absolutely want to impress and is willing to disregard laws.

I'm old enough to remember that cars were sold without an air conditioner, actually made 1000 km trips in August on these cars. An the problem wasn't the temperature, but that the infotainment was a car radio with a cassette tape that couldn't rewind
I remember when houses were built without air conditioning, and some had a radiator in the car garage to to avoid to have to unfreeze the car in the morning.
I remember not going to school because the snow was more than half a meter high.
I remember when two day at more than 32 C in August were considered heatwave.

Steve Jobs didn't have to go on press tours to convince people that a personal computer was an useful thing, Apple made ads to convince people that their computer were better than Tandy and Commodore ones. Not all people needed a PC, but people that found that using a personal computer instead of a mainframe, and people that didn't have access to a mainframe but found that a computer was useful started to buy PCs. Even IBM made a PC to catch some of their customers that were fleeing off their mainframe business.
AI has some use cases where it is useful, but I'm convinced that all the investments made and the infrastructure built are way higher than the money that could be made selling services to people that need them.

A 442 liter freezer costs 600 Euro and cosumes 160W for an average energy consumprion of 277 kWh per year (Whirlpool W3RHS44EW). This is on the big and expensive end for freezers, regular fridges could be more expensive because they can have more gadgets like the ice cube machine that push the price up without move a lot the power consumption.
A monosplit unit of comparable price consumes 1KVA and consumes an esimated 1020 kWh per year for air conditioning. (Samsung Wind-Free Comfort Next Monosplit 12000BTu)
I'ver choosen brans name systems, going for not brand name, you can get less expensive appliances of course. But the elephant in the room is te installation. To install a freezer, you buy it, you get delivered, optionally you clean the inside with glass cleaning spray, way a day and inset the plug in asuitable socket, wait a day to go in temperature and then put the food to freeze in. Easy and fast.For a split unit you have to install the internal and external units, connect them with the pipes and with the electrical wiring, that is non simple asplug a socket, but it's error prone, then you have to make the vacuum and put in the correct R gas. If they sell a canister to you, because most of R gases are dangerous and therfore not available to the general public
Th the end there's the final boss. If you live in an architecturally important building, you need the permit from the "Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape" think a group of HOA Karens looking at the color you want to paint a wall or the blinders, but actually a government official. Basically al building made before WWI are considered important, and there are a lot of these in city centers.
Older buildings that were made for cold winters, so easy to heat an keep the temperature, so retrofitting an air conditioner it's expensive, difficult, and not very effective.

Corporate mergers have in most cases another effect: companies that once made great products, after the merge they start to make an inferior product and the brand name either is dismissed or it's used to rebadge stuff made by totally different companies. I'm Thinking about DEC, Compaq and HP, for instance, where the results were ditching the Alpha CPU architecture for the Itanium one, while firing the engineers that designed the Alpha architecture and inteas of selling printers that were reliable, robust and cheap to operate are now selling crappy printers that need very expensive ink cartidges. C-level people and shareholders are getting a lot of money anyways, but customers are getting a worse service.
So at the end I think that the messages are also for sugarcoating the negative effect on the society in general and not only with the people affected directly: think about datacenters and the damages that are made with the construction and the operation of these. I remember the mall frenzy nearby me that was like twenty years ago: I remember that people against them were signed as Luddites, but now there are a lot of malls that are downsizing and closing. An interesting tidbit is that one of those mall projects that was proposed in 2009 never started because of the protests of people that used the park and the amateur football field where part of the mall was going to be built. Now the mall builder decided to redo the project and make a smaller mall, preserving the park and the football field, because now having a big anchor that also sells electronics and home appliances doesn't make sense anymore: it's better a pick and pay section in the almost grocery anchor and people using e commerce to order stuff.

I think the biggest problem is that a career path where AI could be used heavily and is also advertised and pushed as a workforce reduction tool is way less interesting than other career paths.
Learning programming, graphical design, musical composition, 3D rendering and so on requires time and money and hard study. If one perceives that after years of university the job offers will be very few, even if they like the subject, they will choose a different field.

BMW to cut up to 8,000 jobs . The problem isn't limited to BMW but also to other brands. Maybe they should find what customers really want and not what is getting them bigger profit margins only. Especially when cars are become more and more expensive, and car dealers are more interested to sell loans and insurance than actual cars.
People then could stop to buy new cars or look at other brands that are selling cheaper models with less gadgets. It happened with Japanese brands, then happened with Korean brands and now it's happening with Chinese brands.
And by the way the BYD SEAL looks cooler than the BMW i4.

The biggest problem is the family. If in a family they give a table to watch slop videos to four years old, and smartphones to eight year old without checking them, the battle is lost anyway.
Electronics companies are still making feature phones, if the problem is to remain in contact, there's a cheap technical solution. Mandating interoperable protocol for messaging to the OTT will also cut the problem that people are using Whatsapp instead of SMS.
The problem it's not technical, but it's a social problem, because some parents will gift they kid expensive smartphones instead of feature phones, to show as a status symbol.

I think is a bit like what happens on retail. The same or very similar product is sold by Aldi as WORKZONE, Lidl as PARKSIDE, MXD at MD, DEXTER at Leroy Merlin and so on.
And if you search it sometimes you can find the exact same item sold on Aliexpress or Amazon with a strange brand.

Also Biodance is legit. https://biodance.com/

Except that only a tiny percentage of people don't buy it, the corporation will not notice it.
On the other hand because videogames aren't essential items, one could simply spend their money in other videogames or even other things.

I think a sonic espresso machine with sonic teameri it's going to be a great prop to be in the TARDIS.