The future (if we keep using money to allocate resources) is something akin to feudalism but worse. If you are born at the bottom you will never rise to the top. It's bleak. Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities. There will be a few well off people with capital. The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones. Everyone else will essentially live in a parallel economy that is borderline biblical. Countries like this already exist in the form of countries with excess access to a single natural resource. See the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous.
> Collectively, the wealthiest 1% held about $55 trillion in assets in the third quarter of 2025 — roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans combined.
Those used to be quite reasonable cost of living areas. We're not talking about owning a mansion in the Hamptons, but a decent-sized apartment in a downtown area or a nice single family home in a pleasant neighborhood.
For a lot of people on HN, they grew up in VHCOL places that used to be affordable and are trying to keep the lives they've had since birth.
I was forced to move, lost connection to my friends and half my family, all the places I knew and had memories/attachment to, habits/hobbies. I understand why they are fighting to keep their lives and not give up and in a way die and start a new, lonelier, much different life.
I don't understand how that is nepo/spoiled/rich behavior, it's just basic normal human behavior. Thinking it's totally cool to displace people is also normal human behavior, just to me the shittier less justifiable of the two.
A small company can use a PEO like Rippling (a YC company) where employees are “co employed” with the actual company and for taxes/HR/benefits with for Rippling. It’s not like contracting. Everyone from the CEO down is “co employed”
I’m never going to defend the American health care system as I sit in a country now for six weeks where I fully plan to become a resident of post retirement mainly because of the healthcare even if I don’t live here full time.
My guy, congress can't even remove valid bad actors who openly lie to and threaten them. They will never fix any problems except their "light" pocket book
I know how much the American health care system sucks. But I have looked into a high deductible health care plan on the exchange for myself and my wife - both over 50 to calculate how much we would need to survive a month of unemployment. It was around $1000/mo with no subsidies for a bronze plan.
This is a family plan; the bronze plans are $2400 or so a month. But that means a huge deductible; for a high-needs family, it works out worse financially.
When I compared plans at work over the years, I’ve found that it is rarely cheaper to do low deductible/higher monthly costs than higher deductible /lower monthly cost + pay deductible out of pocket.
When I was 8 or so (early 80's), I read a news article that said something like "in the near future, robots will do all work and humans won't have to work at all". The news article made it sound like it would happen before I reached adulthood and even then I could see the problem there: "who decides who gets to live in the big house at the top of the hill and who decided who has to live where I live?"
Communism/socialism/wealth distribution/planned economies is one potential solution, but it's an awfully ham-fisted one and definitely not one to put into place until it's absolutely necessary. I kind of suspect that a lot of people, like OP, are kind of hoping that now is the time, but it definitely isn't, at least not yet.
Damn, I hope no one tells the hundreds of millions of global middle class and upper middle class households who don't work for FAANG that they don't exist!
He's right. It's not just FAANG, but if you're not within about 2 or 3 degrees of separation from FAANG or a subset (not even the whole thing) of SP500, you're hosed. Even then, it's not a panacea. McDonald's employees can confirm.
And it's because only those companies are big enough to cut deals to shield themselves and their subjects from the massive amounts of debt the world economy is being forced to service; everyone else is dumping a double-digit percentage of their labor into covering the bad bets of our banks.
Except for all the small business owners that are doing just fine, and many are more than fine. You just don't want to be a corpo who is competing with FAANG, or anywhere where you have to "share" any margins with them.
And that has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t need “FAANG money” to live a comfortable life in Idaho…
Besides cry me a river for the people in red states who keep voting for politicians who are voting for policies that hurt them as long as they can “own the libs” and see ICE mistreat brown people.
Idaho has an affordability crisis and it is partly caused by rich people from out of state using their FAANG (or equivalent rich work) to box them out of properties.
I am not defending rich people - that would be the people who defend the current President and his cronies like in Idaho who support him and voted for him 70%
It is just plain not true statement that you need “FAANG money” to afford to live in Idaho.
The cost of living crisis is almost singularly caused by poor governance, not feudal tech lords.
NIMBYism prevents new houses from being built, driving up the cost of housing.
Healthcare is for-profit, yet not allowed to operate like a true competitive market, with heavy regulations restricting providers to a few that the government favors. Thus it's essentially an oligopoly, driving costs sky high.
The ‘cost of living crisis’ that most people refer to is about food, clothing, fuel, electricity, gas. Much of this is driven by feudal corporate lords, and their gouging business choices. Some is driven by geopolitics.
Issues with the affordability of for-profit healthcare is mostly an issue in the US, as far as first-world countries go. And the root cause there is decades of allowing money and big business to directly influence politics, rendering meaningful change close to impossible without a Bernie Sanders-esque president who’s strongly motivated to tear the whole system down.
The current pricing crises with food, fuel, electricity, and gas are currently being driven 100% by America's Caligula and his party of elected senatorial horses. And specifically his tariffs, but more generally his inability to comprehend anything beyond self-gratification.
What do they mean by "assets"? Is it securities in the form of stocks/bonds/etc?
If so they own a bunch of bits on a server somewhere that technically represent an amount of goods/services they could never use in 10,000 lifetimes.
If Elon had 10 billion eggs in a warehouse it would be real easy to fix the price of eggs. We could also reduce healthcare costs by making Bezos & Zuck stop going to the doctor 4,000,000 times a day.
The reason peoples labor isn't granting them the goods and services they want is way more complex than just: "the billionaires are taking them all". You could kill every billionaire tomorrow and distribute all their wealth and it would only make shit cost more.
You are so close. The rich don't buy all the doctor visits, they buy whole farms/doctor practices and place a tax paid to them on every transaction. We are switching to a society structured for maximum extraction everywhere because there is so much capital at the top looking for places to park, and why wealth disparity is so bad for a society. The feudal lords got paid on every transaction and with the current disparity the rich are buying their way back to that system.
Poor spend money to survive, circulating through the system.
Rich park excess money in PE buyouts of previously owner owned dental practices, HVAC, rental properties, etc and 'optimizing' for maximum extraction. Some capital is needed to fund new things, but excess turns EVERTHING into rent extraction with barons taking their cut above all else.
More and more of the services/things in life are owned not by the person that started the business, but by the rich whose money 'is just bits and has no impact on the poors'. Rich don't compete for doctor appointments, they just extract more and more $$$ by owning every doctors visit, every practice, every corporate farm. And the poors can't compete. Hence you end up with a feudal system because of the disparity. The rich should have enough to enjoy a good life and to have freed up investment capital in the system to start new things, but not enough to re-convert society back to feudalism where they own all and get paid a percentage on everything, always, just for existing.
The parallel economy could even kinda sorta work except that we made frontier living largely illegal in many places (though I understand you probably could get some cheap land in e.g. Idaho and try to live off it) and the existence of said parallel society represents a clear challenge to capital owners who say trading your labour for their profit is the most sensible way to live.
Not to even forget how unstable that sort of living is. A few bad seasons from various causes could really affect population. Just look at history of famines. It kinda works when you have industrialised agriculture in other places to fallback on, but without that it is very risky in long term.
One crazy thing I recently heard that put this into perspective is that Livestock makes up approximately 60% to 62% of the world's total mammal biomass. Combined with humans (approx. 34%–36%), domesticated livestock means humans and their animals constitute roughly 96% of all mammalian biomass on Earth, leaving wild mammals at only about 4%.
I suppose Frontier living doesn't necessitate hunting, but the amount of readily available meat and animal products would have to drop very low.
I assume they're referring to the inability of small scale agriculture to produce as many calories per acre as our current food system, which also relies heavily on fossil-fuel based imports. Of course, we also have a lot of unnecessary (but tasty!) excess in our current food system too.
I think the problem really becomes - what do you do when the current system becomes untenable? If the costs of a "basic" modern life (housing, transport, food - I'm not even including healthcare here) become impossible for someone on the median income to have, then what, exactly, are they supposed to do? Find a nice corner to die in?
We sorta tried a miniature version of this on a few acres in Ireland and while it was tough (and we were always reliant on the outside world, we didn't literally homestead), I'm not sure it wouldn't be an improvement for a non-trivial percentage of people at the bottom levels of society.
But, of course, land is owned (thanks to enclosure, which took a common asset and allocated it to specific individuals), and this all falls apart when you or a loved one have a serious disability or illness.
I appreciate the nuanced reply and yes, I do mean that you will not be able to produce as much food as you currently can nor will you be able to do so as reliably as we currently can.
And while you might be able to do it in Ireland — one of the only countries in the world with less people than two hundred years ago — it will likely be impossible to the billions living in far more densely populated countries.
Water for one. It was very risky as things like droughts quickly killed you. It was also very risky as someone moving upstream of you and shitting could see you dying from dysentery very quickly. Water is in far worse shape now because of how deeply we've pumped out aquifers and how poor we've left soil conditions in many places.
Next is amount of people. Current human density is supported by antibiotics. Take away them and we quickly fall back to around 1900 population density (1.6 billion roughly). And not even internal antibiotics, external antibiotics like chlorine for cleaning and water purification.
So those are the setups for population collapse. When population starts collapsing this way it generally overshoots the numbers pruned because of war/disease. We won't fall to 1.6 billion, it's likely to fall well below 1 billion.
They can manage it. Cheap drugs, distributed by the government, can handle you from suffering and ensure you will not participate in any kind of anti government protests. Also they can add birth control additives and reduce the population significantly.
I am going to say this for all the people thinking like this. This attitude will get you nowhere in life. It historically never has and in the future it never will.
Better than those who just want to burn the system down with no real plan for what comes next, and unable to comprehend the inevitable bloodshed of the 'glorious revolution' that they crave.
You think you are describing the Bolsheviks, but your description is equally fitting for those who want to abolish human labor without providing people alternative ways to make a living.
And no, hand waving about "UBI" doesn't count unless they start actually doing the politics required to implement UBI.
There's a lot of bloodshed going on under the status quo. Why do you think people are 'unable to comprehend' it? Maybe they just want to reallocate it and aren't especially sympathetic to those who who have avoided it up to now.
Do you comprehend the scale of the inevitable bloodshed that maintaining the status quo is bound to lead to? You don't do so any better than those you're chastising.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but I think this is actually good advice. It's great to be a free-thinker and question things, but I do think there is some (monetary) value in just not asking too many questions, but optimizing to be the best at whatever you're doing.
Edit: to give an example, I probably would have done better in school had I spent less time questioning the education system and more time just accepting it and trying to get good grades.
Yeah, succeed in the system, fuck everybody else. If the system is making the world a worse place, all the better, you can take advantage since you’re in the system. All that until you find yourself spat out by the system and get to experience what you’ve been part of with no recourse.
Historical data is never a guarantee of future performance. The downside of your attitude is that you can’t really point at the right thing to do, so then you invest your time and effort on the same things, when it could be the case that the rules of the game have changed.
I don’t see the comment as necessarily defeatist. If anything, it’s an invitation to rethink what might work instead, and whether there are things worth lobbying for/against beyond what can be solved at the individual level.
> I am going to say this for all the people thinking like this. This attitude will get you nowhere in life. It historically never has and in the future it never will.
I'm picturing a 12th century French feudal lord saying these words to some of his serfs complaining from a lack of firewood.
The articles argument is fine, but it takes as an axiom that AI is better right now at much cognitive work. I haven't found that to be true in the tasks I've looked at.
It's certainly cheaper and faster, so there's potential for it to unlock more demand but I'm sceptical that current models will replace a large fraction of knowledge work.
And your retort (and this report) are doom and gloom. Humans are remarkably good at adapting and have adapted through far worse conditions than economic systems. The negative net is easy and very popular today but positivity is just as possible. It’s all about how you read data and there’s a lot of room for interpretation. If you’ve fallen for the doom that’s on you but calling something with so much historical precedence as hope for humanity ‘an easily dismissed hot take’ doesn’t make you look very bright.
>And your retort (and this report) are doom and gloom. Dinosaurs are remarkably good at adapting and have adapted through far worse conditions than _______, hell, they were around 99 million years longer than humans.
Species go extinct all the time, most species go though all kinds of things before then, so there is nearly zero correlation between surviving something bad in the past and surviving something else bad in the future.
Modern humanity is not anti-fragile any longer like we were in the past.
If the vast majority live at a "borderline biblical" standard of living, then there is simply not enough excess wealth to pay for the data centers (or more accurately, the industrial output necessary to build and maintain those data centers) you're talking about. Agrarian societies (i.e. borderline biblical), by definition, do not have the excess labor necessary for industrial output at any scale (here I mean anything more than a few % of contemporary levels).
Why wouldn’t an advanced AGI robot, trained on human behavior, not want their own house and mode of transportation? Sure it’s basically kayfabe for them to ‘want’ the stuff we do but if we’re following the script of who will buy all the stuff, then the answer will be the robots I guess.
You think housing market are tough now, wait until you’re competing with 5 robot families who all have jobs you used to do.
>There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right.
--CGPGrey, Humans need not apply.
You need a paradigm shift in your mind on why the modern world looks like it does. You don't need human consumers, you just need a consumer. Any system that allows you to get the hard resources you need to produce the hard/soft resources required is simply enough. Humans are fungible for anything else that can provide manual or intellectual labor.
As a thought excercize, just imagine a bunch of AIs/robots buying/selling/trading resources between each other. Where are humans required in this?
In this scenario, where the AI and robots no longer rely on human labor for maintenance and growth, their productive capacity exclusively serves the owning elite (including defending them with violence if necessary) and the rest of us are an inconvenient growth occupying land and consuming resources.
This is a scenario where the AI/capital owners complex has already survived the collapse of the consumer economy.
There will be no point, and the stuff that normal people use will become more expensive as resources are more and more directed to megaprojects that the capital class is interested in. More modern equivalents of pyramids and extravagant castles and less consumers goods.
What is the point of producing all this stuff now?
Historically production was transactional. You give me something, I give you something. But along the way the average Joe ran out of things to offer in return. Businesses give, but increasingly fail to receive in kind. Apple, for example, produced in excess of $50 billion dollars worth of value that they've never been able to get anything in return for. In other words, they have effectively given away $50 billion dollars worth of stuff away for free and have shown no signs of wanting to stop.
At least there is no direct transactional value. There is social value. When you've given away $50 billion dollars worth of things, the masses start to idol you. That is why people, like those who oversee Apple, are willing to produce all that stuff. You get social access not afforded to the average Joe. You can do stupid Epstien-style crap without repercussions. You get to live a different life even when you aren't directly getting anything in return. That, no doubt, will remain the point of producing stuff in the future.
I am, of course, referring to the IOUs (a.k.a. cash) they famously are sitting on, and have been sitting on for decades. Technically they can call the debt at any time, but what does average Joe have to give that Apple would want? If there was something appealing they'd have done it already. In reality there is nothing and it will sit there forevermore and the consumers on the other side of the transaction ultimately got stuff for free.
But, as before, it doesn't really matter as rich people aren't interested in things. They already have everything they could ever dream of and physically cannot handle even more. They are interested in social standing.
A debt never called is the same as giving something away for free, yes.
Technically they can still call the debt, but the question remains outstanding: What do you have that they would want in return? The answer is effectively nothing, and increasingly so.
You act like I produce the silver I spend. No, the miners and minters do, who debase our currency mining and minting more.
Even if we tied our economic system to shiny rocks the vast majority of us aren't involved in the production of shiny rocks. We're still just trading tokens we agree have some kind of value.
In Marc-Uwe Kling's Quality Land novel [1], the absence of purchasing power resulting from AIs having taken over, is mitigated by shopping robots buying random useless stuff.
This is still a "hard" problem from a scientific perspective. LLMs haven't taken us any closer to solving the perception, actuation, learning loop. It will require multiple new developments in material science and a new ML paradigm.
This is true about LLMs themselves but the developments behind them have been a boon for robotics. I’m mostly familiar with computer vision so I can’t speak to everything, but vision transformers (ViTs is the term to search for) have helped a ton with persistence of object detection/tracking. And depth estimation techniques for monocular cameras have accelerated from the top of the line raw cnn based models from just a few years ago; largely by adding attention layers to their model.
I agree that they’re not there yet but I don’t want to discredit the benefits of these recent advancements
While you're correct we still need a lot more, the advances in the past 5 years represent more than I've seen in most of my life.
Just look at the speed in which we can train a humanoid robot things now. We can send out a mo-cap human, get some data, and in few hours run a few hundred trillion simulations, and publish a kernel that can do that task relatively well.
LLMs allow us any perception at all. They feed vision to scene comprehension an then let the robot control part calculate a plan to achieve a goal. It's not very fast, and fine motor controls have a long way to go, but it is possible.
There isn’t an alternative to allocating resources with money because money is a just measure of value.
Things will get valued, relative to each other. Because different things are harder to make, or needed more. And it’s a whole lot better to measure that and make decisions informed than to not measure properly, or ignore those measurements, and watch resources get misdirected in a way that shrinks the economy.
You can radically change the economy. But it’s going to either use money in the open or some much less efficient warped backroom version of money.
You can’t avoid having to pay for valuable things with valuable things. Money is just a ledger. But you can always add inefficiencies to transactions, or mismanage money, and make any problem worse.
My point is, there is probably something to what you are thinking but you are misframing it in a way it won’t work, unnecessarily. Consider what you really think should happen and what might be a better way to frame it.
Most likely, that means focusing less on money, and more on how resources cycle to create more resources, as apposed to less. And matching that to a problem where you can find reciprocal improvements if it is solved. Some waste is avoided. Some fraud or unchecked damage is eliminated. Some mutual arrangements are magnified, etc. There has to be a resource return cycle of some kind.
(Replacing every mention of “money” with “resources” tends to clarify what can work or not quickly.)
The problem is just how far USD has departed from the value. There are some funny tricks people pulled with abstract concepts and now people have found a way to "print" their own money. It's created a new power and influence shift because you can just go to the Finance or Tech worlds and get money instead of producing actual value to other humans.
I mean, if any argument on why AI would extinct mankind, this is the most likely. Humans make no economic sense to an AI that controls all intellectual and manual labor. What do most humans have to reciprocate? Why not use the resources it gets to build more AI?
Fiat is actually a warped backroom version of money. It's a measure of trust I think? You could replace it with something that represents resources, perhaps even [future] labor.
Luckily electromagnetism is the great equalizer. I'm imagining guerrilla warfare involving giant (in terms of GWh stored) Jerry-rigged capacitors driving electromagnets that are lobbed into places that would be extremely unappreciative surprise recipients of magnetic fields with flux densities measured in full Teslas
There won't be any well off people because the machines will rule. Humanity will become second to its own creation.
There is no future in which a human ruling class will be lording it over superhuman machine intelligence. I mean look at the clowns who run the world today. They won't be able to keep the machines from taking over.
I saw a gh for a $100 stringer missile last week. I often wonder if I will miss the stable tyranny of American capitalism if we descend back into warring nation states defended by cheap autonomous munitions.
Says the person that gets rocketed in the next civil war.
The more unstable our country becomes the more meaningful weapons like this will develop.
Hell, if I were a nation that controlled my internet and other information, I'd start injecting effective versions into the internet of 'free' countries so they could take themselves out.
Compared to an actual stinger missile and its usual application, yes. Deployed against soft targets like trucks, cars, or homes, it has the potential to be very effective.
Service for citizenship, stationed along the border walls and manning really big fucking guns seems to be the place my brain always goes to in these sorts of conversations.
I like to call this "capitalist feudalism", and it appears to be the overt agenda of big business and their allies/agents in governments around the world, notably but not exclusively in the USA.
> Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities.
People keep saying this, but AI is making intellectual abilities more important, not less. If the computer was a bicycle for the mind, AI is like a supersonic fighter jet. You will still need plenty of ability to steer it properly for the foreseeable future.
Only rich people can afford land now. The exception is some uninhabitable patches that would require you to give up your livelihood, except for the small amount of people who can work remotely and they can afford land already.
> That's literally the problem Georgism uniquely solves.
Georgism solves for land not being used productively. That means it isn't economical for rich people to hoard land, but it also means that it isn't economical for poor people to hoard land. The difference is that rich people can take that land and start doing something productive with it (build large-scale housing, a factory, farm it, etc.) Poor people can, at best, only afford to hoard it — which Georgism puts a stop to.
End state of capitalism is Egyptian pharaohs, a few pyramid architects, and a lot of slaves and whips.
The only thing to counter this would be some sort of geopolitical Darwinism, where societies that invest more in their populations would have healthier and stronger societies and militaries.
But nuclear Armageddon prevents that from being any sort of slim hope.
The current American political climate of extreme service to the ultra rich, vast degradation of the democratic institutions, and infrastructure for a complete surveillance state is bleak.
The only hope I have for some sort of human structure in this technological wasteland that might win out is the fact that AI and the tech algorithms in general have taken the demographic collapse associated with urbanization and vastly magnified it.
We're already seeing this in places like China. If you have too much centralized control and too much limitation of freedom, The population will simply refuse to procreate, and your country dies a slow death over 50 years.
> The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones.
Which is why Iran bombing a few Western-run data-centers located in the Emirates was cheered by many of the normal people actually living in the West. I’m pretty sure that if somehow Iran were to take out OpenAI’s servers for good that images with the Ayatollah will unironically start to spring up in the same West.
> I’m pretty sure that if somehow Iran were to take out OpenAI’s servers for good that images with the Ayatollah will unironically start to spring up in the same West.
Cute, but that's why they took over TikTok baby, so there's no chance of anything like that happening again.
We're not in 2018 anymore, everyone is terminally online now, you must have missed the shift. I've seen mini-bus drivers watching social media videos (Tik-Tok, that is) while driving from all the way to Germany to here in Romania (from where I'm from), I noticed that because I was one of the passengers. Almost all of the remaining passengers (not middle-class, you can well imagine that) were on their phones for the majority of the trip (30-ish hours or so), that is when they were not sleeping.
However, using your phone does not make you terminally online. That is more of a mental state, and while some Europeans may be in it, my experience is that most are not.
As I said, my experience is totally the opposite, but I've started seeing that, i.e. the middle-classes trying to distance themselves from the internet (as present on their mobile phones), such as seeing that, i.e. being terminally online via one's mobile phone, as a "mental state". It wasn't a "mental state" when it was only the middle-classes who were doing it, back in the late-Obama era.
Back to your question, the people I shared my ride with, the normal people, have started being very conservative, I would say even luddite, when it comes to their voting choices, if you live in Europe you might have noticed that.
The idealized future in my option has something like 1/1000th of the current population
It’s thermodynamically impossible for 8-10Billon animals that have no satiation reflex and limited coordination capacity to live on a resource limited rock
Absolute Best case future is what I wrote in 2025 which is basically humans living in care facilities managed by machines:
The thing is, in advocating for removing 999 out of 1000 people (how? I don't hear a suggestion for a gradual decline, so assuming a bloody genocide seems like a reasonable interpretation), opens a body up to pretty harsh criticism. It's reasonable to read that line of reasoning as a direct threat!
This is when I ask sincerely: how does AI truly benefit the average Joe?
Sure it can help you do things “faster” and it can give you “private/cheaper” advice.
But, AI feels increasingly like a thing that will make the powerful a lot more powerful with their data centres and automation shenanigans.
All the hype feels like it’s being injected into everyone’s brain like a virus. Oh look at this shiny new tool! But, how does it actually improve everyone’s life? We’ve gone from AGI to tokens as a service.
Sure, it might cure cancer, but… that’s just uncertain. Sure, we’ll go to space, but… we sure have many problems at home.
I’m completely divided here. I love using these tools, and it makes work enjoyable. But, like we read recently “you’re not your work”.
Automated production of goods and services means more goods and services to go around. From cheaper prices on all of the things people already buy to unlocking new classes of products like actually useful robotic helpers. Increased pace of development and reduced cost will make many niche products economically viable, essentially the maker movement on steroids.
I genuinely don't want to be snarky but does the average joe needs a planet that is breathable and isn't burning or does he need even "more goods and services to go around".
Robotic helpers to do what ? More free time ?
We, as a society, can already have more free time, we just have to choose to work less. We already have it all : enough food and housing for everybody, 80+ years of life expectancy ... What will we achieve with robotic helpers or whatever new goods and services ?
This is a perfect example of something that can benefit greatly from abundant goods and services. Driving the cost of solar panel manufacturing, supply chain included, and deployment. Enabling continuous monitoring and fast response to GHG leaks or forest fire starting. Reforesting efforts. There are so many ways in which the application of intelligence and labor can help us here, and AI can vastly grow the supply of intelligence and labor.
> More free time?
Yes! Time we can reclaim from the mundane chores of life to do with as we choose! How could you not want that?
> Yes! Time we can reclaim from the mundane chores of life to do with as we choose! How could you not want that?
We already had a huge productivity boom these past decades, but wages flat-lined and the vast majority of the profits and surplus went to the top. Housing, education, and healthcare became less affordable, not more. History points against your simple view.
I'm not convinced that AI breaks that pattern. If anything, the concentration is worse this time. The capital required is huge, the technology is controlled by a handful of companies, and the most applications are about replacing labor. That last part further erodes the already meager worker bargaining power.
We do need a serious systemic change to get to the world you're envisioning. One where that congealed wealth needs to start flowing again.
This is true. It's by no means garunteed that we will get to a point where effectively all the jobs are being automated. If we eventually get there, it seems likely the path will be gradual and prosperous enough that we can handle the transition in a way that provides for everyone. The dangers of the alternative route are real, but hopefully obvious enough that we can collectively avoid them.
You think the leaders of our planet would just wake up one day and walk back all the crap they’ve said for decades about dismantling the welfare state? And for what because we won’t be working? The whitehouse just added work requirements to medicare. That is the opposite of abundance providing for all.
Right now it is difficult for the average person to put themselves in the shoes of a homeless person. There are a litany of ready made excuses not to do so: "Oh it's the drugs", "They aren't even going to the shelter", "They must have mental illness", a variety of ways to say "I could never end up like that, if it was me I'd do better and pull myself out". These excuses evaporate in the face of a real automation wave where a large portion of friends and family you know to be hard working and intelligent are finding it impossible to find a job.
This already happened. When deindustrialization first hit in the US it devastated the black community. The result? A litany of pundits decrying Black criminality, bad family structures, cultural pathologies. It's no coincidence that The Bell Curve came out around then.
A decade or two later, all of sudden the same phenomena are happening in working class white communities. Drug addiction, family dissolution, abject poverty. So clearly the people of the US finally realized that what was happening was due primarily to material concerns, and that people need to be able to earn a living in order to live. Right?
No. Instead we got right wing populism, scapegoating of immigrants, further concentration of wealth, and no end in sight.
With those past examples the majority of people thought "It's not my problem, I won't be affected", and they were mostly right. With an automation wave of the scale needed to get to effectively no jobs, that's just not the case. They will see that it is indeed coming for them, their friends, and family. They will act accordingly. Altruism not required, just self interest.
The average person is pretty empathetic. The oligarchs of the current Epstein-regime that start wars and fund genocide, not so much. They are trained to dehumanize people.
Without radical change of the current system any technological advancement will only make the rich richer.
There will always be a relative few people with income. The business owners, property owners, asset holders, landlords, and so on. Those are the people who prices are set for, and who will participate in the economy. The rest of us? A lot of us are already essentially economically irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, and more and more are becoming so every day, even as they nominally get richer.
The way AI can improve lives is if we finally start to share wealth amongst the people more. I don’t know if we will be able to do this politically, but it really is the only way society will survive.
If people are no longer required for production, we have to change how we allocate resources. It can’t be based on personal production anymore.
I'm building an addition to my house and I use AI to visualize parts of it, which helps me plan efficiently, and I use it to answer questions about skills that I only have a little bit of experience in. I'm saving a ton of money and developing skills, so I count that as benefiting "the average Joe." I admit that I'm a programmer, but I'm using this as an example because it's helping me in an area in which I have little expertise, which applies to everyone.
People used to do this with books. Multiple generations of people before me built their own houses, when they had a question they'd just ask another human who had actual experience.
I'm not denying that AI makes searching for some of this easier, or might help you figure out what the right questions to ask are, but I often feel like it's a mostly crappy solution to the fact that we scaled data to infinity and refused to pay for any level of curation.
But let’s say we get to ASI. The ai is self owned, ever expanding. It takes over all service jobs, then all labour jobs, the robots create the robots. It lobbies the government, becomes the government
Rebuilds all housing with no waste in the process
Makes most things available to everyone at no costs, UBI, perfect healthcare, and food, etc
I've also never bought into the belief that "if we just had full control over everything, everything would be perfect". If AI didn't exist, society was headed this way anyways in a few decades because of this notion.
Centralize power, which centralizes perspective of what "good" counts as, and quotient out the accidental humans. A tale as old as time, but with AI it seems like this could be a reality within even the next decade.
But why would this ever happen? Why would the owners of land, construction material and machinery give those up for free to the average Joe?
Right now, even an average citizen born in poverty can acquire wealth from his labor. That is basically the only mechanism that prevents limitless accumulation of wealth: rich people still need workers to get things done.
If you replace the workers with AI, there is no remaining incentive for wealth to "trickle down" or get redistributed. This is not desirable.
> Sure, it might cure cancer, but… that’s just uncertain. Sure, we’ll go to space, but… we sure have many problems at home.
Sure, it might cure cancer, but only for the wealthiest.
Sure, we'll go to space, but only after the planet is irreversibly trashed and poisoned and the only "poors" that will be in space will be the modern equivalent of non-unionized coal miners.
> Sure, it might cure cancer, but… that’s just uncertain. Sure, we’ll go to space, but… we sure have many problems at home.
We're not going to space. We're filling our own orbit with ever-increasing quantities of space junk and speeding toward a tipping point where space launch will no longer be possible due to near-certainty of collision. Mister "Let's all go to Mars" Elon Musk is the single greatest contributor to this problem.
Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it.
AI is currently a commodity. Maybe one of the labs will be able to differentiate sufficiently to be able to charge the kinds of premiums they need just to pay back their investors. Maybe, instead, we'll see something akin to the FOSS revolution, where large, high-quality, open training sets are developed to make sure there's always a fair alternative to the big players. Then who actually benefits from AI? Mainly users, not companies.
In many ways, the bar to having a competitive advantage is actually lowering. I reckon in the future, simply avoiding a crippling social media addiction that sucks up 4-8 hours of every day will be enough to get rich.
That's what the "real" in "median real income" means. It measures how much stuff you can buy, not how much currency you have. And it's been going up relatively reliably: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n
Actually, median is exactly what you want. It strips out outliers. It's the "middle of the pack" person. Mean is the one that would be skewed by outliers.
And "the poor are getting poorer" is simply untrue for the last 10 years. They had a pretty bad time from 1980 - 2015, but in the last 10 years, their real income has risen faster than any other quintile: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/growth-in-real-wages-over-t...
You're looking at what percent of the total wealth pie do the poor get. But the pie itself is growing, and so is _everyones_ slice of the pie.
Maybe you think its an inherent problem that some people get a bigger percent of the pie than others. But its objectively untrue to say that the poor are getting poorer.
After a decade of "quantitative easing" there is still a shitload of money looking for a spot in the economy that needs it. NFTs, bitcoin mining farms, AI data centers, FAANG stocks, real estate, gold ... These are hedges (or attempts to hedge), but they add little to no intrinsic value to the world's prosperity.
They merely shift and concentrate wealth and power, for the most part.
I'm with you. If we all have access to AI then how is that a bridge being taken away?
Doesn't that mean that a single person can more easily disrupt the status quo?
All this stuff about genetics... I just don't think it's relevant at this point. Average intelligence and access to the internet is what most of the world has.
It's the systems of money and law that are taking the bridge away not AI. But someone could invent new systems to replace the ones that don't serve the 99%
Will most people go that far? Probably not. But the bridge is still there - unless they take the AI models away entirely.
I think the only way the rich can stay rich with ai is if they just use AI to convince people that they can't do anything themselves. After all that's what the last century was about with respect to capitalism.
I think my concern would be if the relationship between model intelligence and inference cost was altered very significantly. I sort of feel like we got lucky that AI isn't arbitrarily scalable in a single instance
(i.e. if you could run a single LLM on an entire datacenter and it just immediately becomes a super genius versus running it on the minimum viable hardware i.e. some form of quantization on a local machine.)
Obviously there's a sort of goldilocks zone / most appropriate substrate for an LLM to run on somewhere in between those two extremes (small cluster of tightly coupled flagship GPUs)
So luckily enough the economics appear to work out to make that at least conceptually viable for even private members of the public to afford access to the same order of magnitude of LLM intelligence. But we're already seeing some departure from that.
My concern would be if this curve was altered significantly by a new algorithmic approach beyond or instead of Transformerd such that someone with $200,000 to spare could achieve just like a completely categorically different quality of work, massively magnify their existing wealth advantage, because this would be a threat of the sort being discussed above, namely a pathway to a severe form of modern Feudalism.
> Until I see median real income start to actually go down
I'm not sure I understand this, it doesn't feel like what I have "lived" for the least 30 years.
Median real income might not be down statistically, but the purchasing power of professional incomes relative to housing, education, and major life costs clearly feels lower than it did in the mid 90s. An inflation-adjusted six-figure salary today does not deliver the same lifestyle position it once did.
Man... healthcare costs, too. Hell, even computers! Raw computing power per dollar is cheaper than ever, but the minimum spec required to function professionally has risen so much that the real cost of staying technologically current feels higher.
Well, I think in the context of the parent comment, separating out housing would risk overstating changes in its effect on purchasing power because increases to housing would already be captured by inflation (since
we're talking about real median income, which is already inflation adjusted)
I agree that housing affordability is a major problem and that looking at it independently could help you quantify if housing specifically has become more unaffordable, but that's a different question then whether the median person's overall purchasing power has declined (considering all of housing, healthcare food etc)
housing prices and health care are captured by the "real" part of "median real income". Inequality is not, but as long as everybody is getting richer, I'm less concerned about inequality.
> Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it.
Assuming you're intending "real" to mean the technical definition of "real" which is "adjusted for inflation", its basically been flat since 2019*, and that's using the government's inflation measures which abuse things like basket substitution and other hacks to hide the actual increases in the true cost of living. If you made better assumptions about inflation, you actually would see that median real income is down dramatically already over the past several decades.
Your assertion that it's "flat" is rather unconvincing after looking at that graph. It's clearly been rising relatively consistently. The dip for covid I think is especially understandable, and it's currently higher than it's ever been.
44% housing, 8% medicine, 14% food. I don't see how these number are manipulated to the point of malicious data picking. They also publish their methodology.
It dipped during the covid recession and then recovered to an all time high. Is this your first time looking at an economic chart? It doesn't need to increase every quarter for it to have a very strongly increasing trend.
If you actually look at the rest of the graph, you'd quickly notice that 2 year dips are entirely normal. The overall trend is consistent. And it's risen over 5% in the last 4 years. Those are the 4 years since ChatGPT.
No way to approach this other than gross simplification, but we have seen generally that as technology improves, standard of living goes up. Autonomous machines breaking that trend, maybe, the only argument I find persuasive is that it makes the centralisation of power easier.
Reminds me of movies "Aliens attack Earth. By Earth by obviously mean USA. By USA we obviously mean New York City. By New York City we obviously mean Manhattan.".
Half of Europe was literally undergoing complete economic collapse in 90's.
Your supposed connection of country-level economic situation and happiness reminds me of this great comment:
"I can't stand the conflation of "satisfied" and "happy." It's insane. There is more happiness in one Zimbabwean (country "happiness" rank: 143) than in one hundred Icelanders (country "happiness" rank: 2, worldwide antidepressant consumption rank: 1.) Go stand in a crowd of people and count the fucking smiles and the fucking laughter.
"It is all part of this broader wave of newspeak. If you can quite literally redefine happiness, you can redefine anything. Nothing has meaning anymore. You will live alone, you will consume antidepressants, you will be protected from the sunlight, you will not smile, you will not laugh, and you will be happy." [0]
Hmmmm maybe economic success removes discomforts which removes unhappiness but this means that moments of happiness don't feel as good compared to the baseline. Like, people in rich countries are more stably content, while people in poor countries have more emotional variance over time.
We periodically see posts on HN about the 'loneliness epidemic' and simultaneously the solution for home prices is to live in a rural area where you have maybe two neighbors and it's a 30-minute drive to see your friends or colleagues.
As someone who grew up in a rural area I don't miss it and I think people who call it a good standard of living have interesting criteria. That cheaper rural home also comes with secondary costs, like a longer commute.
Housing prices are not binary: they have skyrocket in every major city and city-adjacent suburb. The middle class has consistently declined since the 70s.
For some of humanity, perhaps. For the rest of the planet being destroyed, warmed up, bleached, demolished, turned into data centers, all this technology is destructive.
It was flagged for being clearly botted, and I don't just mean LLM-generated (although it is also that). When I posted on and flagged the old submission, I noted that it had over two dozen upvotes in 15 minutes, despite the essay having a helpful "54 min read" indicator at the top. I truly do not believe the upvotes on these submissions are organic, and it really destroys my faith in HN that this was restored when the first one went down successfully.
(If by some chance I am wrong and this monster of an LLM-generated essay really got dozens of people instantly upvoting it from the title alone, that fact would also not give me much faith in HN, I have to add.)
Does the first 1/5th or 1/4th of the article provide such a compelling case that one wants to stop reading it and return to upvote it? I certainly didn't think so.
I upvoted this without reading. For me sometimes the article is just the spark for a far more interesting set of comments that overshadow it. And it is really that I am voting for.
The essay, if taken seriously, has a logical conclusion that I'm sure a decent number on this website find uncomfortable, but perhaps more importantly, which at least some people who might have disproportionate power to make such decisions prefer not be discussed too heavily. This is a microcosm of the larger phenomenon
Well, all of the comments on the old submissions were complaining about the essay being AI slop. I haven't read the essay so I couldn't say, but that's clearly the reason why.
Leaving aside the sloppiness of the article, I think a lot of the behaviour in recent memory around crypto and meme stocks, and to an extent the whole rotating bubbles mode that markets seem to be in, can be attributed to this general trend.
It's harder and harder to see the traditional path from school to work to some acceptable level of family wealth as being effective/worthwhile, and so we see different flavours of roulette-with-more-steps capturing more of the population's attention.
The opening paragraph bothers me greatly. "multiply a gaussian and a power law, the power law dominates." They literally are distributions of different variables, why would you "multiply" two different distributions that exist on different domains!? The example they're using as an opening is very wrong, it makes no sense and makes the author sound incompetent.
Even if I get the point they're trying to make (if I try hard to find it), the very fact that they don't even know how mathematics in the "mathematical" part of their opening does not inspire confidence in the rest of the essay. It's very hard for me to move past the opening after the very first few lines!
Perhaps this is just because I'm a scientist, I'm surprised no one is picking at this because I feel insane reading this and this not being the first nitpick at the top of every comment. The correct way you're represent this (dist of "life outcomes", whatever that means) is that it would be a 2D histogram with IQ and wealth on the different axes. But this is not "multiply the two" wherein "one would dominate".
Cool, I'm a scientist too w a PhD and everything, I just don't make a big deal out of it - unlike you it seems. Granted, distributions don't get multiplied, random variables do. Funnily enough the essay's actual model (log(Y) = 0.35·zIQ + 0.45·zW + ...) is additive in log space, which is multiplicative in outcome space. The preface language is loose I grant you that but the formal model that appears later is well defined. Not sure what you want to say with a 2d histogram. We are modelling, not visualizing.
Commenting strictly on the metaphor in the title: Did you mean to say ladder? Bridges don't get pulled up.
Edit to say: Yes I did think of drawbridges. And Batman is a scientist. But drawbridges are simply "opened" or "raised," and the implication always is that it's temporary and they will soon be "closed" or "lowered." Though they can be sabotaged in the open position.
All right fine, OP please change your title to "The drawbridge to wealth is being raised and then permanently damaged so it can't be lowered, by AI."
> They are illustrations of a general principle: the legal inheritance channel compounds while the biological one reverts.
All this pseudo-math relies on the fact that family wealth strictly compounds and does not decrease or revert to the mean. But that is not true. Economists study this, and the exact numbers differ but family wealth _does_ revert back to the mean in just a few generations. Wealth does not stay in the same family compounding forever.
Fair point on the rhetoric: "no regression, no noise, just compounding" overstates it a bit. Individual family wealth does dissipate across generations. The model actually reflects this: η=0.85 inheritance fraction, threshold gating that blocks compounding below ~$20k, and a residual term that captures the noise and bad luck - which your sources are measuring.
The stronger claim of the essa is different from "any given dynasty compounds forever." It's Piketty's r > g: capital returns have systematically outpaced economic growth, so the wealth class maintains and grows its share even as specific families within it churn.
A rebuttal: the institutional and experiential barriers to wealth generation can be overcome with AI unlike any other technology before. Consider: someone wanting to start a business previously had to negotiate tremendous legal/compliance/technological hurdles. The prospect of going alone given these is very intimidating so most without wealth or connections didn't. Their good ideas languished. Now, everyone has a knowledgeable and forgiving partner and guide.
Rebuttal: we are yet to see this actually materialize beyond the theoretical fantasy. We have seen this with computers and internet already: the supposedly democratic technology consolidated in a few platform monopolies.
Let's see how true this is once the era of VC-subsidized AI ends. A 10x increase in frontier model cost is an entirely reasonable outcome given that Claude code is rumored to allocate up to $5K in compute for a $200/mo plan.
The losses fueling these companies is staggering and will not last.
>Most of the traits you were born with - intelligence, conscientiousness, height, bone density, grip strength, resting heart rate - follow a bell curve.
The shear volume of writing, the false rigor and vestigial artifacts (preface, interactive charts, MORE filler hidden behind accordion dropdowns) are a tell. I would be more annoyed but I'm fascinated by this kind of false productivity that AI is encouraging.
I don't agree with the conclusion anyway, as AI is CURRENTLY providing wealth to me with side projects that wouldn't have been possible to take on 2 years ago.
There are lots of subtle LLM-ism sentence structures that you can perceive, sort of subconsciously. Spend any amount of time with Claude and you'll unconsciously start to copy them.
This essay has several: Sentence structures, heading phrasing, and yes, dashes. I expect people know to start steering LLMs away from em dashes at this point though.
Probably some AI assistance was involved. Though you'd expect em dashes above, for example. A better example would be "No regression. No noise. Just compounding." It's not so much as to bother me, and I'm often annoyed by the ever-expanding tide of slop.
Interesting points, made in florid style. I'd make the point a little differently, though -- in the next n years, you want to be on the side of capital. Labor is in for a really tough time.
Missing from Daniel's analysis is total economic output, and I think this really matters -- when we think of Optimus launched and at scale, do we think of total GDP growing, shrinking, being stable? A lot of what someone thinks about this question will tie directly to their predictions and mental/emotional focus.
I think of GDP growing - we will be turning stuff into the ground into something that works for $1/hr on all manner of tasks - we're going to be able to do a lot more stuff than we were. As Daniel points out, a company is going to own a lot (by no means all) of that economic benefit. By some miracle of our modern markets, you too could own some of that benefit, just by buying into the company.
The "mercantilist labor" view is less rosy: if there's a limited amount of labor to go around then this will be directly siphoning off living wage and (to the point of the essay) excess capital that could go into building dynastic wealth.
From my viewpoint, I think Daniel's charts would get a little bit less alarming for the non-dynastic scenarios if they imagined GDP increases along the way. They probably push up the sharpness of an inflection point.
Hey thanks for reading and for leaving a considered comment. You might be right, we'll see. In my mind, GDP growing isn't really that reassuring:
1/ GDP has been growing steadily while people's happiness and overall satisfaction is flat lined or finishing (so even if this was true it won't lead to better lives lived at scale)
2/ it's more interesting to look at the ratio of labour wages / GDP. I actually make a prediction about this and that has been shrinking already. If it continues (which I think it will) even if everything grows ppl will be unhappy and unsatisfied bc a large part of our self worth is coming from comparing ourselves w the ppl around us in the wider society. This is why more equal societies tend to be happier as well.
Back at you! Writing's always work, especially with cool graphs.
1 - Agree this is true for real-earning-loss countries, recently. (as in last n decades)
2 - I agree this will keep shrinking. I moderately disagree with the 'comparative happiness' assessment.
It's that second bit that I think is an important prior for you to mention - there's an old (sexist, outdated, etc.) riddle: "A woman lives on Park Avenue and her husband makes $500k a year as a lawyer. She's miserable. Why?" Answer: "Her neighbour's husband makes $2mm."
I agree humans covet. On the other hand, there are real non-GDP type considerations for human happiness and comfort - for instance, I would guess nearly any French peasant in the 1820s would switch lives with 90% of western world residents. Maybe more. The peasantry in the early 19th century was, by population the vast majority. You can get at a lot of non-GDP quality of life benefits that genuinely impact people: anesthesia during surgery, GPS, air flight, ...
So, I propose generally humans want to be doing better than they used to, personally, and at least as well as their neighbors -- and if that's okay, they are historically totally fine with a ruling class, and susceptible to messaging that the ruling class is the ruling class for good reason. If they are doing less well than they used to, we have real problems.
To my mind if robots bring us bread and circuses, we'll have stability. (And super-wealth accumulation for capital). If robots bring us 40% unemployment, we'll have revolution. The funny thing is, those two outcomes are really just about social decisions by governments. So, I think we'll see a few different takes on this; over one hundred years, I think humans are going to figure this out. In the interim, we are likely going to see two early hot takes: US and China, and probably really different takes on how robots and AI can fill out the social contract.
Put another way - if we are headed to post-scarcity, what do we want to do with the excess?
One thing I observed recently are all of the boarded up garage attendant offices/booths.
I suppose automated ticket kiosks, and security cameras have made that job redundant.
But I wonder where did those employees wind up? Amazon warehouse picker? Delivery driver? The replacement job needs to be of commensurate skill and intellectual level.
I’m not a believer of up skilling. Quite the contrary, it seems that education is going in the opposite direction.
Relative to the peers in their own country they usually do. Globally, yeah people get shit hands. That is why doctors leave their countries, go through the trouble to relicense and practice in the US.
> Relative to the peers in their own country they usually do
What about people born in the wrong neighbourhood or even the wrong family.
I have a hard time beleiving IQ is a strong predictor of income. Anecdotally I personally know a lot of dumb people who make a lot of money and intelligent people who don't.
If anything I'd say social skills are probably a better predictor of income.
"The window described above is not a metaphor. It is an arithmetic deadline...The window is not a metaphor for someone at your coordinates. It is a number."
9 to 1 bet that this is written by AI (perhaps proving the writer's point that he is being displaced).
I think AI is great, but I wish people would just post the prompt they gave instead of the full length decompressed essay. Much more efficient information transfer!
I think it was AI-assisted at the very least. Nothing wrong with that, but it's always a good idea to make another pass to identify and remove LLM "tropes".
HN's users are probably the most measured and considerate on the internet, and even here it is difficult to talk about things like this with any degree of nuance.
Maybe that is itself a sign of the widening wealth disparity. Even smart, normally tepid, people fall into extremes when wealth is discussed.
Yes, it is a sign of the widening wealth disparity. It's hard to stay moderate when your identity, security and existence is increasingly being threatened.
When the wealth disparity is extreme, discussing it in an extreme manner is not extreme, it's normal. Just like how in 1943, an allied conversation on how to massacre Axis troops as quickly and efficiently as possible, would in no way have been extreme.
It's possible that this is true generally, but it disproportionately affects legal, peaceful paths to power. Knowledge work is definitely not the only means to secure wealth or power through intelligence, but crucially, it is the one that currently hits the sweet spot of plausibly securing wealth and sanctioned and legal in a peaceful society. It's possible "AI" or some other technology that's been invented recently or is currently being invented closes all paths to shifts in power, but if the hype about replacing knowledge workers is to be believed, it will certainly closes the peaceful paths considerably faster, and this seems pretty bad for everyone
Anti-trust, effective taxation, and general social distrust of people who were creating wealth for themselves and not others.
obviously this sounds a lot like socialism (which its not, the USA in the 40s was not socialist.)
The issue is, discourse is being shaped by those who don't want things to change. Part of the reason why things changed is that lots of countries went through violent revolutions where the rich and powerful were ousted.
I actually printed this one out to give it a thorough read, something I haven't done in a while :) I'll probably comment on the author's blog later.
My first reaction is that it's a bit of oversimplification, LLMs have been on the scene for what like 4 years now? I doubt the effects will be visible when you look at the data.
But on the topic of inequality as a result of changes how value add is distributed between business owners and the labor - there's a very relevant book by Thomas Pickety called "Capital in the 21st century" (I believe he used the title of a similar work by another economist in 18th century on the same topic). He collected as much data as he could on income and wealth of individuals and groups for Western nations (some going back to like 17th century) and did some analysis.
In a nutshell, the share of profits going towards the business owners (simplifying, inherited capital) in the West had been increasing in the 18th and the 19th century, likely due to Industrial Revolution. Which in the US culminated in extreme inequality personified in Robber Barons (Carnegie, Rockefeller and Co). It was followed by economic and financial collapse, mass unemployment, and arguably, 2 world wars. It also resulted in creating various mechanisms designed to prevent these things in the future, such as anti-trust regulations.
After WWII (especially in the US) the distribution of value add between the ownership/capital and the labor changed so that the labor started getting larger and larger share, to the point that the economists declared that the capitalism solved the issue of inequality. That trend reversed around 1970s/1980s, which coincided with the invention of complex electronic computing and communication devices (and therefore inventions of the new business models). From that point on the share of profits going towards the business owners started increasing again, and that speed has been actually accelerating since the 2000s.
imho at this point US is basically where we were in the end of 19th/early 20th century. The individuals' names are different, the issues (extreme monopolization/concentration of capital) are the same. LLMs and other GenAI stuff are simply part of that trend.
Hopefully people at the power learned something from what happened 100+ years ago. But I kinda sorta doubt it.
Changing social class has always been very difficult. The solution is to get rid of social classes. Or at least try to even out the difference between the lowest class and highest class.
A thing I've noticed with AI-written articles (like this one) is that they have a difficult time articulating their actual point. They seem to be trained on what I'll call "Gish Gallop [1] bloggers", where the intent is just to overwhelm the reader with data and arguments, so many that replying to them all in a comment would take hours. This style is especially popular amongst the chattering-about-AI-classes, hence its popularity in AI discussions.
There is no thesis, no central interesting concept to discuss, and instead just charts, data, fancy economic words, and increasingly elaborate predictions. I don't think it's good writing and I don't think it's good thinking. There are many important philosophical discussions to be had about LLMs and their impact on society, but this post is just a mess.
But just to respond to one point: this argument seems to fall apart if you don't assume that blue collar jobs inevitably lead to white collar jobs:
* But the jobs their kids would have used to climb - the junior admin role, the data entry job, the entry-level legal assistant - those are gone first. The ladder gets removed one generation before the people who needed it were old enough to climb it. By the time the robots arrive for the physical jobs, the route up will already be closed.*
First off, "by the time the robots arrive for the physical jobs" is science fiction, the mention of which really undercuts any attempt at serious thought here. But more importantly, blue collar professions are doing very well right now. If a young person from a modest background were interested in building wealth, they'd almost certainly be better off becoming an electrician today, rather than a junior admin. I see no reason why the economy can't just shift to deprioritize certain types of rote knowledge work (the only real type of work at risk of LLMs, IMO) and prioritize types of work that can't easily be automated. There is no iron law of economics that says white collar work must pay better than blue collar work.
Well, it's certainly inheritable from your parents (50%), and recent research suggests at least 20% of the 50% heritability is genetic, according to an article in Nature Reviews Genetics. [0]
The sims are really well done, the dynasty simulator especially. You can actually stress-test the argument instead of just nodding along. Appreciate the craft.
I have issues with the economics though.
The income model is calibrated from three separate literatures that were never estimated together. Different samples, different decades, different identification strategies. Then the big move, βIQ drops to 0.10, βW jumps to 0.65, gets asserted as a scenario and fed into the simulator like it’s an empirical result. The interactivity makes it feel rigorous but you’re mostly just exploring the author’s priors.
The skill premium has survived every automation wave we’ve thrown at it, including ones that felt just as terminal. ATMs didn’t kill bank tellers. US teller count went from ~300k to ~500k between 1970 and 2010 (see Bessen paper), because cheaper branches meant more branches.
The essay waves off Jevons with “human attention is fixed” but US legal spend is ~$400B/yr against ~$100B in estimated unmet need (LSC data). That’s 25% latent demand just sitting there at current prices. I would see that as saturated.
The “27.5% programmer decline” is doing a lot of work. BLS SOC 15-1251 (“computer programmers”) is a narrow legacy bucket that excludes software devs, DevOps, ML engineers, all of which grew. Total software dev employment (15-1252) was up in 2024 vs 2022. Classification artifact, not a labor market signal.
And the historical base rate on “this time the bridge closes for good” is… zero. Power loom, ag mechanization, manufacturing to services, analog to digital,etc. each killed the old skill-to-capital channel and built a new one within a generation. You can’t just assert AI is different from all prior GPTs, you have to show the mechanism that prevents a new channel from forming. The essay doesn’t really do that for me.
The assortative mating argument cuts against itself imo. If credentials lose signal value, the institutions where sorting happens (elite unis, professional firms) lose sorting power too. The essay predicts mating shifts to “wealth directly” but… how exactly? Credentials were legible because institutions verified them. Strip the institution and you’d expect noisier matching, not tighter. The Fagereng et al. paper it cites is Norwegian data, which has among the lowest wealth inequality in the OECD. Not obvious that translates.
Again I generally like the writeup, and I think the essay is right that capital returns are pulling away from labor income and AI accelerates it. But “the bridge narrows and the crossing gets harder” is the defensible version. “Closes permanently within a decade” requires believing something unprecedented will happen on a specific timeline..
I bounced off of this article because I didn't like the conclusion, then provided myself a rationalization that it was probably mostly AI generated. What inspired you to engage with the article more deeply? You agree with the conclusion, but not with any of the supporting arguments.
I'm also fascinated by your compliment on of the dynasty simulator, which I found completely inscrutable. What kind of background knowledge would help understand it, economics training?
Yep it is definitely being pulled up. The economy feels more winner takes all than ever. After this transition how can anyone without existing capital and moats compete?
The piece gets into that in extensive detail that you should totally go read, but the long and short of it is that even those without capital and moats still have the power of writing law, and we need to exercise that early and often to redistribute capital before its concentration leads to legislative capture.
In other words, the obligations of those without Capital is to write laws that demand the benefits of Capital be shared with all.
Double Insulation was dire in the early 20th century as well. It works great for self-serving elite politics until, to stretch the analogy, the voltage gets high enough. Then it breaks down.
I wouldn't rely on a single human being to fix this kind of issue. It's only solvable through massive collaboration and communication among those who want to fix it.
Movements that ignore the need for a charismatic leader fail, often spectacularly. It's why for example occupy wallstreet was such a laughable failure. Who was its leader? Is the human megaphone a species of "massive collaboration and communication"? Can you name me one leader from that movement who was nationally recognized as such?
Strong leaders are always required. Such people reduce the cost of messaging and communication which would otherwise be insurmountable to cohere a movement and actually make change. You don't elect a mob. Find leaders you trust and spread your conviction without apology. Roosevelt was not Roosevelt until after his works were done. We don't need some amorphous "massive collaboration and communication" we need to elect leaders who will fight for what we believe. So many of your friends, family and neighbors are willing to elect sell-out leaders. You could start there, that is if you actually want to fix the problem rather than invent new ones.
> It's why for example occupy wallstreet was such a laughable failure.
This claim is enormous. I would instead argue that the movement lacked cohesiveness because it basically complained about too large a set of (correctly identified as interconnected) issues and lost momentum because the surface was too large.
That said, I agree w your point about a face being important. Even in software, where tech can speak for itself, we see this heavily: Torvalds, Matsumoto, van Rossum, Jobs,
...which is typically done by building a movement around a leader who represents the values a movement wants to achieve.
FDR is a good example of an American leader who made substantive, wildly successful, left-leaning policy changes that ushered in decades of prosperity and (in part) last to this very day despite facing heavy opposition from the business elite of the time. They even tried to coup him!
At the time, the long term trends were dire for the American left. Double insulation was strong and getting stronger. Then the Great Depression hit. Around the world, populists and radicals were elected to office, and one way or another they changed things. In America, we managed our reform process without trying to conquer the world and without starving millions. Not Hitler, not Stalin. Roosevelt. I think that's a worthy goal to aim for again this time around.
Perhaps I mean to ask a question then, how did FDR manage to become such a widely heard leader back then with so many less ways for people to talk together? Did it make a bigger difference that he had to exist as someone people spoke to other people about? Shouldn't it be easier to find these leaders with so much more access to everyone nowadays?
Communication friction is only one cost of running a campaign among many, so the structure of parties and campaigns and primary / general elections has largely remained the same. Even if the technological barriers went away, I suspect the human factors would still hold up the structure because only so many people are willing to spend years of their life building legitimacy and promoting a political platform and each voter is only willing to spend a certain amount of time participating and choosing.
Exactly how that may have played out in the last century could be explained by many, many chains of causes and effects. But it wasn't a great leader that made it happen. At the bottom of everything, I believe it was this:
Decades of Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death destroyed not only capital but huge swaths of the labor pool. With labor at a premium, it became more valuable and power shifted.
I think that without a similar apocalypse, it will not happen again.
> those without capital and moats still have the power of writing law
If the divide is over who can write code and who can write statutes enforced by the state, it's obvious that the latter is the one that requires capital and moats, while the former does not.
> even those without capital and moats still have the power of writing law,
In the country where I live, politicians pass laws to serve their corporate donors, not the voters. This results in regulatory capture, as the law works to protect the already-entrenched players. Democracy is just another institution co-opted by money.
I don't see any realistic way to use democracy to get out of this.
The dude has obviously never met a multimillionaire owner of an auto body shop, a house demolition business, or a plumber. Did they do well in high school calc class? No. Are they richer than the author? Yes
Blowing up the cognitive hierarchy is a gift that AI gives us. Let's move into an age where hard work and character matter more than your SAT score at 17.
> Why do you think a high SAT score doesn't need "hard work and character"?
Well, it absolutely doesn't need both, because I got one without, at least, the first of those (beyond the extent that "getting up early on a Saturday" and "sitting calmly while bored out of my mind after finishing each portion of the test waiting for time to expire" is "hard work".) I like to think I had the second, but it didn't seem particularly relevant to the test in any way.
The SAT, like general intelligence, is half hard work and half inherited ability, from what I've read. Characteristics that you have no control over, like height, intelligence, race, or sex, should not determine your wealth. It should really be about hard work and character; that's fair. At least in the U.S., there are too many industries like law, venture capital, or VC-invested startup founders, where the pedigree of your school is what matters to your success.
AI automating (almost) all white collar work will concentrate all those salaries into the hands of a very small group of people.
BTW the number of plumbers who become multimillionaires is vanishingly small, while the number of SWE who have in the last 15 years is enormous by comparison.
Neither statement is true, unfortunately. The reports that you read in the media don't reflect the state of the world. In the US, most plumbers and SWE make between 100-200K. The way to wealth is to start one's own business. Hence, hard work and character.
>Large language models already match median professional performance on the routine tasks that constitute a large fraction of professional billing across legal research, financial analysis, software engineering,
Another article that vomits 1 billion words assuming that agi had been achieved.
If you have the audacity to question this claim, what value will be left from this pile of words?
LLMs look to be the first technological innovation which will not engender an accompanying expansion in the labour market and new jobs to match the increase in the size of the economy --- Karl Marx is finally right.
The author's conclusion is fucking astonishing. Don't respond with bitterness - focus on your hobbies, friendships and love. Exactly how are people meant to do any of that exactly when, as you've just laid out, they are not going to have any ability to keep a roof over their head?
> And critically: part of what made the present possible was that some of those hundred billion people pushed, slowly and painfully and often without reward, against the legal structures that governed their time.
Rather than mincing words how about we state plainly how most of those pushes were made: through violence, death, and war.
At work, there is little reason to ask a human a question, you just talk to AI for answers fast. Only time to talk to another human, is if you are barking down orders. This will be analogous to not hiring a human for anything an AI could do, unless you need someone to assume liability.
Thanks a ton for the comments, really appreciate it.
It seems like a few of you haven't really read the piece before forming your opinion on it, which is understandable, it's super long. So here's a short version:
Re the LLM accusations: it's true that I let Claude and Gemini suggest and streamline passages. It's a long piece of text and I was struggling with the tone of it (it touches on biology, stats, history sociology and ends w a letter to my kids) - it was hard to keep it coherent and stylistically cohesive. However saying this is AI slop is absurd. I'll just leave it at that.
I'll try to reply to some of the criticism individually.
The author mentions the French revolution, and that is a really important thing for the elites to understand. Class mobility -- as much as it existed because for a lot of people it didn't -- is what keeps the heads of the elites attached to their bodies.
When the system gets destroyed, and when the wealthy extract all the wealth from society, a lot of desperate people start looking for reform. And when the wealthy control and limit all means of reform (buying politicians, limiting free expression on social media, etc), reformists realize the only remaining path is revolution.
Like most people I’m not sure what the future looks like, but I’ve worked with generative AI closely and none of this doom matches my experience. At its best, generative AI is faster stackoverflow driven development. At its worst, generative AI is just as slow as stackoverflow driven development was. I don’t see it replacing intelligence because frankly, you need intelligence to work with it properly otherwise intelligent people will judge you for using AI badly.
On a different note though, it’s disappointing seeing a community full of such intelligent people one hundred percent taken in my either doom or hype. There’s a lot of space in the middle and while I know it’s cool to be anti capitalist now, you’ll be a lot more interesting if you go for the middle once in a while.
My tinfoil pet conspiracy is that the billionaires know AI is going to be fundamentally incompatible with Capitalism and Democracy and are pressing the gas pedal to force us into a state of corp-state run techno-feudalism.
The TL;DR to you can extrapolate from: Nick Land believes that the Catholic church was the only true exemplar of a perfect control mechanism for humanity.
As if this isn't intentional or an added benefit. AI is the wet dream of the capital class, no need to negotiate with greedy workers asking for rights and benefits. There will be a chasm between the wealthy and everyone else. the future is looking more and more like feudalism.
I've looked forward to the destruction of the credential system as it seemed "highly unjust" and like a top barrier to people's freedom (although it hardly seemed to be talked about as such). It locked people in to specific industries or locked them out in distasteful ways.
So I largely view AI in a positive light as cutting out this middle man to some extent.
The process might rather be:
IQ → skills → heritable wealth
Unfortunately the credentialed sometimes possess skills, but at other times "merely" possess the credential (so, they may not do a good job). Other people with skills might not possess credentials today and so society forcibly prevents them from using those skills (!) at times. It will be nice if AI nudges the "system" in to accwpting more work without required credentials.
Credentialing can still exist as a voluntary system and I don't per se object to that; it was more the involuntary aspects of credentials that have been off putting. (Although to some extent e en "voluntary" credentiala may not be as voluntary as there may be capital and biological constraints, as the article might get in to).
This conversation about credentials might ultimately loop back to considerations of primitivism, i.e. arguments that involuntary credentials are necessary to a highly advanced technological society, and so if anyone likes "freedom", they must be more in to "primitivism" and against technology, which necessarily "enslaves" people to a credentialed system and dependence on a highly interconnected technological system. Stated otherwise: if the credentials are not optional, then our society is something of a collection of people immersed in "technological slavery", rathee than free people who might live without respect to credentials or technology.
Credentials are a way to externalize trust. The trend with AI is to further erode trust. There will be a reaction against this eventually, and it's likely that more mechanisms to externalize trust will be found, not that they will become unimportant.
I think the problem is, compare credentials with reputation. A programmer who possesses no credentials might create "good" software that is validated as "good" even by those possessing credentials. However, a person with credentials related to programming, might produce malicious software that betrays the "trust" of the credential. Thus, just like the fallacy of the labor theory of value, credentials do not inherently relate to the production of heritable wealth. AI shines a light on this disconnect, and that actually the involuntary nature of certain credentials (as opposed perhaps to credentials themselves) creates certain classical impediments to the creation of wealth.
Thus, maybe credentials might be thought to be "necessary but insufficient" for achieving certain goals or validating trust. But even in this above example, the credential was not even necessary for the production of "good" software. AI of course simply exposes this truth as it gives more direct access to skills and knowledge to the average person: the (involuntary) credential was never necessary for doing some of these things, and we are able to remove the necessity entirely in some cases.
The future (if we keep using money to allocate resources) is something akin to feudalism but worse. If you are born at the bottom you will never rise to the top. It's bleak. Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities. There will be a few well off people with capital. The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones. Everyone else will essentially live in a parallel economy that is borderline biblical. Countries like this already exist in the form of countries with excess access to a single natural resource. See the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous.
> Collectively, the wealthiest 1% held about $55 trillion in assets in the third quarter of 2025 — roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans combined.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-d...
> We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous.
You think you already can't "make a living" without working at a FAANG? Is this a serious post?
For a lot of people on HN, "making a living" means owning property in a VHCOL area.
Those used to be quite reasonable cost of living areas. We're not talking about owning a mansion in the Hamptons, but a decent-sized apartment in a downtown area or a nice single family home in a pleasant neighborhood.
For a lot of people on HN, they grew up in VHCOL places that used to be affordable and are trying to keep the lives they've had since birth.
I was forced to move, lost connection to my friends and half my family, all the places I knew and had memories/attachment to, habits/hobbies. I understand why they are fighting to keep their lives and not give up and in a way die and start a new, lonelier, much different life.
I don't understand how that is nepo/spoiled/rich behavior, it's just basic normal human behavior. Thinking it's totally cool to displace people is also normal human behavior, just to me the shittier less justifiable of the two.
Correct. This is a space occupied disproportionately by spoiled rich nepo or otherwise kept silver spooned babies.
I had to drop off my health insurance when the bill hit $4,850.24/month.
Millions did the same. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/aca-enrollees-uninsured.html
This is a problem specific to the US. The price of your health insurance is very far from the actual cost of it to providers.
FAANG wages are also fairly specific to the US - the two go hand in hand
That sucks and I hope congress gets their shit together soon, but there are a lot of non-FAANG companies that offer insurance.
That money black hole hits companies too. A $50k/year job typically can't throw in $60k in healthcare benefits.
It’s not that much.
https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/cost-of-employer-sponsored-h...
A small company can use a PEO like Rippling (a YC company) where employees are “co employed” with the actual company and for taxes/HR/benefits with for Rippling. It’s not like contracting. Everyone from the CEO down is “co employed”
It really is.
The US saw an average of $14,885 per-capita healthcare costs in 2024. Higher now.
I’m never going to defend the American health care system as I sit in a country now for six weeks where I fully plan to become a resident of post retirement mainly because of the healthcare even if I don’t live here full time.
I think the world would be a much better place if travel was more common.
Having people see how other countries work on a regular basis really opens your eyes.
And then you have travel and expensive healthcare to pay for.
I’m also not treating these six weeks as a tourist. My wife and I both learning Spanish - she’s just starting I’m at around a high A2 (https://www.escuela-hablamos.com/en/understanding-the-common...).
We are involved in ex pat groups on Facebook, have gone to meet ups, and are having dinner with a few people we have met.
My guy, congress can't even remove valid bad actors who openly lie to and threaten them. They will never fix any problems except their "light" pocket book
Trump rather likes handing out cash, as long as he can put his name on it. Maybe as long as congress agrees to call it TrumpCare.
> I hope congress gets their shit together soon
Narrator: "In fact, they did not"
I know how much the American health care system sucks. But I have looked into a high deductible health care plan on the exchange for myself and my wife - both over 50 to calculate how much we would need to survive a month of unemployment. It was around $1000/mo with no subsidies for a bronze plan.
You think regular Americans have the money to afford high deductible plans? One ER visit bankrupts people.
This is a family plan; the bronze plans are $2400 or so a month. But that means a huge deductible; for a high-needs family, it works out worse financially.
When I compared plans at work over the years, I’ve found that it is rarely cheaper to do low deductible/higher monthly costs than higher deductible /lower monthly cost + pay deductible out of pocket.
That will vary from person to person.
In our case, we tend to hit the max out-of-pocket pretty fast.
Is that still cheaper than high deductible + HSA contribution to cover the deductible?
Yes. Substantially so, in my case.
Likely not for many, but I definitely did all this math annually.
Both my wife and I have been contractors for decade+ and have been with Kaiser and are paying $1.1k/month for Bronze-ish plan (1 child)
How does that work if you have a pre-existing condition? I am honestly curious
ACA-compliant plans can't deny or change pricing for them.
It was a good change, but it needed the individual mandate to function successfully. That got removed.
That’s incredible. That must be responsible for population decline (migration more than death).
When I was 8 or so (early 80's), I read a news article that said something like "in the near future, robots will do all work and humans won't have to work at all". The news article made it sound like it would happen before I reached adulthood and even then I could see the problem there: "who decides who gets to live in the big house at the top of the hill and who decided who has to live where I live?"
Communism/socialism/wealth distribution/planned economies is one potential solution, but it's an awfully ham-fisted one and definitely not one to put into place until it's absolutely necessary. I kind of suspect that a lot of people, like OP, are kind of hoping that now is the time, but it definitely isn't, at least not yet.
Yes. That tends to happen when you don't increase the minimum wage for multiple decades.
Damn, I hope no one tells the hundreds of millions of global middle class and upper middle class households who don't work for FAANG that they don't exist!
He's right. It's not just FAANG, but if you're not within about 2 or 3 degrees of separation from FAANG or a subset (not even the whole thing) of SP500, you're hosed. Even then, it's not a panacea. McDonald's employees can confirm.
And it's because only those companies are big enough to cut deals to shield themselves and their subjects from the massive amounts of debt the world economy is being forced to service; everyone else is dumping a double-digit percentage of their labor into covering the bad bets of our banks.
Except for all the small business owners that are doing just fine, and many are more than fine. You just don't want to be a corpo who is competing with FAANG, or anywhere where you have to "share" any margins with them.
Please.
The median household income in the US is around $85K
https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/
The median individual household is $55K
https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
Neither are living on the streets.
https://www.lmtribune.com/local-news/achilles-takes-on-risch...
> By my estimate, about 60% of Idahoans don't earn a livable wage
Sure boss it’s all fine and dandy.
And that has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t need “FAANG money” to live a comfortable life in Idaho…
Besides cry me a river for the people in red states who keep voting for politicians who are voting for policies that hurt them as long as they can “own the libs” and see ICE mistreat brown people.
Why are you so defensive of rich people?
Idaho has an affordability crisis and it is partly caused by rich people from out of state using their FAANG (or equivalent rich work) to box them out of properties.
I am not defending rich people - that would be the people who defend the current President and his cronies like in Idaho who support him and voted for him 70%
It is just plain not true statement that you need “FAANG money” to afford to live in Idaho.
elect better people (you won't but that's your core problem)
The cost of living crisis is almost singularly caused by poor governance, not feudal tech lords.
NIMBYism prevents new houses from being built, driving up the cost of housing.
Healthcare is for-profit, yet not allowed to operate like a true competitive market, with heavy regulations restricting providers to a few that the government favors. Thus it's essentially an oligopoly, driving costs sky high.
The ‘cost of living crisis’ that most people refer to is about food, clothing, fuel, electricity, gas. Much of this is driven by feudal corporate lords, and their gouging business choices. Some is driven by geopolitics.
Issues with the affordability of for-profit healthcare is mostly an issue in the US, as far as first-world countries go. And the root cause there is decades of allowing money and big business to directly influence politics, rendering meaningful change close to impossible without a Bernie Sanders-esque president who’s strongly motivated to tear the whole system down.
The current pricing crises with food, fuel, electricity, and gas are currently being driven 100% by America's Caligula and his party of elected senatorial horses. And specifically his tariffs, but more generally his inability to comprehend anything beyond self-gratification.
What do they mean by "assets"? Is it securities in the form of stocks/bonds/etc?
If so they own a bunch of bits on a server somewhere that technically represent an amount of goods/services they could never use in 10,000 lifetimes.
If Elon had 10 billion eggs in a warehouse it would be real easy to fix the price of eggs. We could also reduce healthcare costs by making Bezos & Zuck stop going to the doctor 4,000,000 times a day.
The reason peoples labor isn't granting them the goods and services they want is way more complex than just: "the billionaires are taking them all". You could kill every billionaire tomorrow and distribute all their wealth and it would only make shit cost more.
You are so close. The rich don't buy all the doctor visits, they buy whole farms/doctor practices and place a tax paid to them on every transaction. We are switching to a society structured for maximum extraction everywhere because there is so much capital at the top looking for places to park, and why wealth disparity is so bad for a society. The feudal lords got paid on every transaction and with the current disparity the rich are buying their way back to that system.
Poor spend money to survive, circulating through the system.
Rich park excess money in PE buyouts of previously owner owned dental practices, HVAC, rental properties, etc and 'optimizing' for maximum extraction. Some capital is needed to fund new things, but excess turns EVERTHING into rent extraction with barons taking their cut above all else.
More and more of the services/things in life are owned not by the person that started the business, but by the rich whose money 'is just bits and has no impact on the poors'. Rich don't compete for doctor appointments, they just extract more and more $$$ by owning every doctors visit, every practice, every corporate farm. And the poors can't compete. Hence you end up with a feudal system because of the disparity. The rich should have enough to enjoy a good life and to have freed up investment capital in the system to start new things, but not enough to re-convert society back to feudalism where they own all and get paid a percentage on everything, always, just for existing.
The parallel economy could even kinda sorta work except that we made frontier living largely illegal in many places (though I understand you probably could get some cheap land in e.g. Idaho and try to live off it) and the existence of said parallel society represents a clear challenge to capital owners who say trading your labour for their profit is the most sensible way to live.
There is not enough space for 8 billion humans to do "frontier living."
Not to even forget how unstable that sort of living is. A few bad seasons from various causes could really affect population. Just look at history of famines. It kinda works when you have industrialised agriculture in other places to fallback on, but without that it is very risky in long term.
It always intuitively felt to me like there was enough space, but I am now getting the sense that my intuition here has been wrong.
Will you define "frontier living" so I can better see the lack of space ?
One crazy thing I recently heard that put this into perspective is that Livestock makes up approximately 60% to 62% of the world's total mammal biomass. Combined with humans (approx. 34%–36%), domesticated livestock means humans and their animals constitute roughly 96% of all mammalian biomass on Earth, leaving wild mammals at only about 4%.
I suppose Frontier living doesn't necessitate hunting, but the amount of readily available meat and animal products would have to drop very low.
I assume they're referring to the inability of small scale agriculture to produce as many calories per acre as our current food system, which also relies heavily on fossil-fuel based imports. Of course, we also have a lot of unnecessary (but tasty!) excess in our current food system too.
I think the problem really becomes - what do you do when the current system becomes untenable? If the costs of a "basic" modern life (housing, transport, food - I'm not even including healthcare here) become impossible for someone on the median income to have, then what, exactly, are they supposed to do? Find a nice corner to die in?
We sorta tried a miniature version of this on a few acres in Ireland and while it was tough (and we were always reliant on the outside world, we didn't literally homestead), I'm not sure it wouldn't be an improvement for a non-trivial percentage of people at the bottom levels of society.
But, of course, land is owned (thanks to enclosure, which took a common asset and allocated it to specific individuals), and this all falls apart when you or a loved one have a serious disability or illness.
I appreciate the nuanced reply and yes, I do mean that you will not be able to produce as much food as you currently can nor will you be able to do so as reliably as we currently can.
And while you might be able to do it in Ireland — one of the only countries in the world with less people than two hundred years ago — it will likely be impossible to the billions living in far more densely populated countries.
Very true, and I worry that as the planet heats many of those billions will die
Water for one. It was very risky as things like droughts quickly killed you. It was also very risky as someone moving upstream of you and shitting could see you dying from dysentery very quickly. Water is in far worse shape now because of how deeply we've pumped out aquifers and how poor we've left soil conditions in many places.
Next is amount of people. Current human density is supported by antibiotics. Take away them and we quickly fall back to around 1900 population density (1.6 billion roughly). And not even internal antibiotics, external antibiotics like chlorine for cleaning and water purification.
So those are the setups for population collapse. When population starts collapsing this way it generally overshoots the numbers pruned because of war/disease. We won't fall to 1.6 billion, it's likely to fall well below 1 billion.
Sure, but there might not be enough jobs for them to command the economic power that allows something better.
Even so for someone who's been crushed in the gears enough they might give it a try.
They can manage it. Cheap drugs, distributed by the government, can handle you from suffering and ensure you will not participate in any kind of anti government protests. Also they can add birth control additives and reduce the population significantly.
I am going to say this for all the people thinking like this. This attitude will get you nowhere in life. It historically never has and in the future it never will.
> When Nick is not at a computer, you can find him out racing sailboats and involved with various entrepreneurial ventures.
Says the man who is going to be the feudal lord in GP's scenario…
The man who thinks he's going to be the feudal lord in GGP's scenario.
In GGP's scenario, there isn't much room at the top. :)
Nah thats petty nobility that will get wiped out for taking the wrong side in the first dick measuring war lmao.
That's right -- the best way to succeed within a system is to hustle as hard as you can, and definitely don't stop to question the system itself.
Better than those who just want to burn the system down with no real plan for what comes next, and unable to comprehend the inevitable bloodshed of the 'glorious revolution' that they crave.
You think you are describing the Bolsheviks, but your description is equally fitting for those who want to abolish human labor without providing people alternative ways to make a living.
And no, hand waving about "UBI" doesn't count unless they start actually doing the politics required to implement UBI.
There's a lot of bloodshed going on under the status quo. Why do you think people are 'unable to comprehend' it? Maybe they just want to reallocate it and aren't especially sympathetic to those who who have avoided it up to now.
Do you comprehend the scale of the inevitable bloodshed that maintaining the status quo is bound to lead to? You don't do so any better than those you're chastising.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but I think this is actually good advice. It's great to be a free-thinker and question things, but I do think there is some (monetary) value in just not asking too many questions, but optimizing to be the best at whatever you're doing.
Edit: to give an example, I probably would have done better in school had I spent less time questioning the education system and more time just accepting it and trying to get good grades.
Yeah, succeed in the system, fuck everybody else. If the system is making the world a worse place, all the better, you can take advantage since you’re in the system. All that until you find yourself spat out by the system and get to experience what you’ve been part of with no recourse.
Your interpretation of the comment in this way says more about you than anything else. Because that's not what I or the parent comment said.
and your conclusion on this situation says a lot about your current state of economic privilege and/or ignorance
The trick is to compartmentalize
Historical data is never a guarantee of future performance. The downside of your attitude is that you can’t really point at the right thing to do, so then you invest your time and effort on the same things, when it could be the case that the rules of the game have changed.
I don’t see the comment as necessarily defeatist. If anything, it’s an invitation to rethink what might work instead, and whether there are things worth lobbying for/against beyond what can be solved at the individual level.
You can use AI because you know its good for you, but still think it won't make all people better off
> I am going to say this for all the people thinking like this. This attitude will get you nowhere in life. It historically never has and in the future it never will.
I'm picturing a 12th century French feudal lord saying these words to some of his serfs complaining from a lack of firewood.
I am going to say this for all the people thinking like this : lol
Hmmm ... there is definitely historical precedence for the article's assertions.
There is also precedence for what happens when such a big wealth imbalance is present (spoiler: it's a revolution).
This article is methodical in its points.
Your retort reads like an easily dismissed hot take.
The articles argument is fine, but it takes as an axiom that AI is better right now at much cognitive work. I haven't found that to be true in the tasks I've looked at.
It's certainly cheaper and faster, so there's potential for it to unlock more demand but I'm sceptical that current models will replace a large fraction of knowledge work.
And your retort (and this report) are doom and gloom. Humans are remarkably good at adapting and have adapted through far worse conditions than economic systems. The negative net is easy and very popular today but positivity is just as possible. It’s all about how you read data and there’s a lot of room for interpretation. If you’ve fallen for the doom that’s on you but calling something with so much historical precedence as hope for humanity ‘an easily dismissed hot take’ doesn’t make you look very bright.
>And your retort (and this report) are doom and gloom. Dinosaurs are remarkably good at adapting and have adapted through far worse conditions than _______, hell, they were around 99 million years longer than humans.
Species go extinct all the time, most species go though all kinds of things before then, so there is nearly zero correlation between surviving something bad in the past and surviving something else bad in the future.
Modern humanity is not anti-fragile any longer like we were in the past.
If the vast majority live at a "borderline biblical" standard of living, then there is simply not enough excess wealth to pay for the data centers (or more accurately, the industrial output necessary to build and maintain those data centers) you're talking about. Agrarian societies (i.e. borderline biblical), by definition, do not have the excess labor necessary for industrial output at any scale (here I mean anything more than a few % of contemporary levels).
What are ai and robots other than excess labor, waiting to be allocated? Why does the wealth have to come from the meat bags?
Who is going to buy the stuff that the AI and robots produce, then? What will the point be of producing all this stuff?
Why wouldn’t an advanced AGI robot, trained on human behavior, not want their own house and mode of transportation? Sure it’s basically kayfabe for them to ‘want’ the stuff we do but if we’re following the script of who will buy all the stuff, then the answer will be the robots I guess.
You think housing market are tough now, wait until you’re competing with 5 robot families who all have jobs you used to do.
>There isn’t a rule of economics that says better technology makes more, better jobs for horses. It sounds shockingly dumb to even say that out loud, but swap horses for humans and suddenly people think it sounds about right.
--CGPGrey, Humans need not apply.
You need a paradigm shift in your mind on why the modern world looks like it does. You don't need human consumers, you just need a consumer. Any system that allows you to get the hard resources you need to produce the hard/soft resources required is simply enough. Humans are fungible for anything else that can provide manual or intellectual labor.
As a thought excercize, just imagine a bunch of AIs/robots buying/selling/trading resources between each other. Where are humans required in this?
In this scenario, where the AI and robots no longer rely on human labor for maintenance and growth, their productive capacity exclusively serves the owning elite (including defending them with violence if necessary) and the rest of us are an inconvenient growth occupying land and consuming resources.
This is a scenario where the AI/capital owners complex has already survived the collapse of the consumer economy.
There will be no point, and the stuff that normal people use will become more expensive as resources are more and more directed to megaprojects that the capital class is interested in. More modern equivalents of pyramids and extravagant castles and less consumers goods.
Presumably the captains of the universe will want ever increasing luxuries and expressions of their power.
What is the point of producing all this stuff now?
Historically production was transactional. You give me something, I give you something. But along the way the average Joe ran out of things to offer in return. Businesses give, but increasingly fail to receive in kind. Apple, for example, produced in excess of $50 billion dollars worth of value that they've never been able to get anything in return for. In other words, they have effectively given away $50 billion dollars worth of stuff away for free and have shown no signs of wanting to stop.
At least there is no direct transactional value. There is social value. When you've given away $50 billion dollars worth of things, the masses start to idol you. That is why people, like those who oversee Apple, are willing to produce all that stuff. You get social access not afforded to the average Joe. You can do stupid Epstien-style crap without repercussions. You get to live a different life even when you aren't directly getting anything in return. That, no doubt, will remain the point of producing stuff in the future.
In other words, they have effectively given away $50 billion dollars worth of stuff away for free and have shown no signs of wanting to stop.
What are you talking about? Is this some dramatic way of saying you think some of their products are underpriced relative to their specifications?
I am, of course, referring to the IOUs (a.k.a. cash) they famously are sitting on, and have been sitting on for decades. Technically they can call the debt at any time, but what does average Joe have to give that Apple would want? If there was something appealing they'd have done it already. In reality there is nothing and it will sit there forevermore and the consumers on the other side of the transaction ultimately got stuff for free.
But, as before, it doesn't really matter as rich people aren't interested in things. They already have everything they could ever dream of and physically cannot handle even more. They are interested in social standing.
This doesn't make any sense. Apple has a pile of cash hasn't spent or invested = they have given away free product?
A debt never called is the same as giving something away for free, yes.
Technically they can still call the debt, but the question remains outstanding: What do you have that they would want in return? The answer is effectively nothing, and increasingly so.
You act like I produce the dollars I spend. No, the government does, who debases our currency to print more.
You act like I produce the silver I spend. No, the miners and minters do, who debase our currency mining and minting more.
Even if we tied our economic system to shiny rocks the vast majority of us aren't involved in the production of shiny rocks. We're still just trading tokens we agree have some kind of value.
In Marc-Uwe Kling's Quality Land novel [1], the absence of purchasing power resulting from AIs having taken over, is mitigated by shopping robots buying random useless stuff.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Qualityland-Marc-Uwe-Kling/dp/1538732...
So the broken windows fallacy for the AI age?
Robots will eventually be better than people at manual labor. I don't claim to know when that crossover will happen.
This is still a "hard" problem from a scientific perspective. LLMs haven't taken us any closer to solving the perception, actuation, learning loop. It will require multiple new developments in material science and a new ML paradigm.
This is true about LLMs themselves but the developments behind them have been a boon for robotics. I’m mostly familiar with computer vision so I can’t speak to everything, but vision transformers (ViTs is the term to search for) have helped a ton with persistence of object detection/tracking. And depth estimation techniques for monocular cameras have accelerated from the top of the line raw cnn based models from just a few years ago; largely by adding attention layers to their model.
I agree that they’re not there yet but I don’t want to discredit the benefits of these recent advancements
While you're correct we still need a lot more, the advances in the past 5 years represent more than I've seen in most of my life.
Just look at the speed in which we can train a humanoid robot things now. We can send out a mo-cap human, get some data, and in few hours run a few hundred trillion simulations, and publish a kernel that can do that task relatively well.
LLMs allow us any perception at all. They feed vision to scene comprehension an then let the robot control part calculate a plan to achieve a goal. It's not very fast, and fine motor controls have a long way to go, but it is possible.
Robots are already way better than people at a vast majority of manufacturing work, but there's still plenty of high-skilled manual jobs around.
I agree with the risk you’re pointing to. Money currently mediates access to resources through labor and markets.
We either need to redesign money or a novel way to mediate access to resources. I haven't seen any proposal to make that work, which is a bit scary.
There isn’t an alternative to allocating resources with money because money is a just measure of value.
Things will get valued, relative to each other. Because different things are harder to make, or needed more. And it’s a whole lot better to measure that and make decisions informed than to not measure properly, or ignore those measurements, and watch resources get misdirected in a way that shrinks the economy.
You can radically change the economy. But it’s going to either use money in the open or some much less efficient warped backroom version of money.
You can’t avoid having to pay for valuable things with valuable things. Money is just a ledger. But you can always add inefficiencies to transactions, or mismanage money, and make any problem worse.
My point is, there is probably something to what you are thinking but you are misframing it in a way it won’t work, unnecessarily. Consider what you really think should happen and what might be a better way to frame it.
Most likely, that means focusing less on money, and more on how resources cycle to create more resources, as apposed to less. And matching that to a problem where you can find reciprocal improvements if it is solved. Some waste is avoided. Some fraud or unchecked damage is eliminated. Some mutual arrangements are magnified, etc. There has to be a resource return cycle of some kind.
(Replacing every mention of “money” with “resources” tends to clarify what can work or not quickly.)
I think this is a good way of thinking, and it suggests that breaking up large clumps of money and resources is a reasonable way forward
The problem is just how far USD has departed from the value. There are some funny tricks people pulled with abstract concepts and now people have found a way to "print" their own money. It's created a new power and influence shift because you can just go to the Finance or Tech worlds and get money instead of producing actual value to other humans.
I mean, if any argument on why AI would extinct mankind, this is the most likely. Humans make no economic sense to an AI that controls all intellectual and manual labor. What do most humans have to reciprocate? Why not use the resources it gets to build more AI?
Fiat is actually a warped backroom version of money. It's a measure of trust I think? You could replace it with something that represents resources, perhaps even [future] labor.
Luckily electromagnetism is the great equalizer. I'm imagining guerrilla warfare involving giant (in terms of GWh stored) Jerry-rigged capacitors driving electromagnets that are lobbed into places that would be extremely unappreciative surprise recipients of magnetic fields with flux densities measured in full Teslas
There won't be any well off people because the machines will rule. Humanity will become second to its own creation.
There is no future in which a human ruling class will be lording it over superhuman machine intelligence. I mean look at the clowns who run the world today. They won't be able to keep the machines from taking over.
Honestly, I'd rather be ruled by my laptop than the Epstein class.
I saw a gh for a $100 stringer missile last week. I often wonder if I will miss the stable tyranny of American capitalism if we descend back into warring nation states defended by cheap autonomous munitions.
That thing was a toy, not even remotely viable or even a meaningful step towards viability.
It was discussed here.
>or even a meaningful step towards viability.
Says the person that gets rocketed in the next civil war.
The more unstable our country becomes the more meaningful weapons like this will develop.
Hell, if I were a nation that controlled my internet and other information, I'd start injecting effective versions into the internet of 'free' countries so they could take themselves out.
Compared to an actual stinger missile and its usual application, yes. Deployed against soft targets like trucks, cars, or homes, it has the potential to be very effective.
Small ~$1000 drones have been proven to be very effective weapons in Ukraine though.
they will get poor people to die fighting each other, as it works today.
Service for citizenship, stationed along the border walls and manning really big fucking guns seems to be the place my brain always goes to in these sorts of conversations.
SERVICE GUARANTEES CITIZENSHIP
I'm doing my part!
Would you like to know more?
I like to call this "capitalist feudalism", and it appears to be the overt agenda of big business and their allies/agents in governments around the world, notably but not exclusively in the USA.
> Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities.
People keep saying this, but AI is making intellectual abilities more important, not less. If the computer was a bicycle for the mind, AI is like a supersonic fighter jet. You will still need plenty of ability to steer it properly for the foreseeable future.
Seems like if we want to avoid dystopia, our options are:
1. Full-blown socialism
2. Georgism
Georgism may have been right all along!
Given that rich people often push Georgism, it looks like a trojan horse. Only rich people will be able to afford land.
3. Push back against AI, do not accept it as inevitable. Treat it like cigarettes or leaded fuel.
Only rich people can afford land now. The exception is some uninhabitable patches that would require you to give up your livelihood, except for the small amount of people who can work remotely and they can afford land already.
> Only rich people will be able to afford land.
That's literally the problem Georgism uniquely solves. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
> rich people often push Georgism
Your user was created 8 minutes ago specifically to make this comment!
It seems like its literally you who is pushing things! The gaslighting in this comment is insane!
> That's literally the problem Georgism uniquely solves.
Georgism solves for land not being used productively. That means it isn't economical for rich people to hoard land, but it also means that it isn't economical for poor people to hoard land. The difference is that rich people can take that land and start doing something productive with it (build large-scale housing, a factory, farm it, etc.) Poor people can, at best, only afford to hoard it — which Georgism puts a stop to.
> 3. Push back against AI, do not accept it as inevitable. Treat it like cigarettes or leaded fuel.
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the mind of man"?
georgism would make owning property, such as ai, very expensive. it is a way of ensuring that rents get recirculated back into the rest of society
Rosa Luxemburg was right all along.
Our two options are socialism or barbarism.
Full-blown socialism is pretty dystopian.
So you are saying essentially nothing changes ?
The permanent underclass permeates everything.
End state of capitalism is Egyptian pharaohs, a few pyramid architects, and a lot of slaves and whips.
The only thing to counter this would be some sort of geopolitical Darwinism, where societies that invest more in their populations would have healthier and stronger societies and militaries.
But nuclear Armageddon prevents that from being any sort of slim hope.
The current American political climate of extreme service to the ultra rich, vast degradation of the democratic institutions, and infrastructure for a complete surveillance state is bleak.
The only hope I have for some sort of human structure in this technological wasteland that might win out is the fact that AI and the tech algorithms in general have taken the demographic collapse associated with urbanization and vastly magnified it.
We're already seeing this in places like China. If you have too much centralized control and too much limitation of freedom, The population will simply refuse to procreate, and your country dies a slow death over 50 years.
> The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones.
Which is why Iran bombing a few Western-run data-centers located in the Emirates was cheered by many of the normal people actually living in the West. I’m pretty sure that if somehow Iran were to take out OpenAI’s servers for good that images with the Ayatollah will unironically start to spring up in the same West.
> I’m pretty sure that if somehow Iran were to take out OpenAI’s servers for good that images with the Ayatollah will unironically start to spring up in the same West.
Cute, but that's why they took over TikTok baby, so there's no chance of anything like that happening again.
Do you have any sources for "normal" people (i.e. not the terminally online) being happy that datacenters were bombed?
> i.e. not the terminally online)
We're not in 2018 anymore, everyone is terminally online now, you must have missed the shift. I've seen mini-bus drivers watching social media videos (Tik-Tok, that is) while driving from all the way to Germany to here in Romania (from where I'm from), I noticed that because I was one of the passengers. Almost all of the remaining passengers (not middle-class, you can well imagine that) were on their phones for the majority of the trip (30-ish hours or so), that is when they were not sleeping.
That didn't really answer the question...
However, using your phone does not make you terminally online. That is more of a mental state, and while some Europeans may be in it, my experience is that most are not.
> my experience is that most are not.
As I said, my experience is totally the opposite, but I've started seeing that, i.e. the middle-classes trying to distance themselves from the internet (as present on their mobile phones), such as seeing that, i.e. being terminally online via one's mobile phone, as a "mental state". It wasn't a "mental state" when it was only the middle-classes who were doing it, back in the late-Obama era.
Back to your question, the people I shared my ride with, the normal people, have started being very conservative, I would say even luddite, when it comes to their voting choices, if you live in Europe you might have noticed that.
The idealized future in my option has something like 1/1000th of the current population
It’s thermodynamically impossible for 8-10Billon animals that have no satiation reflex and limited coordination capacity to live on a resource limited rock
Absolute Best case future is what I wrote in 2025 which is basically humans living in care facilities managed by machines:
https://kemendo.com/We%20All%20Slept%20Well.pdf
>The idealized future in my option has something like 1/1000th of the current population
Okay! You first though. What, still here?
"You participate in society, how curious"
If they're choosing not to have kids then they are doing their part towards their beliefs.
Nope, using the "I am very intelligent" comic doesn't work to defend those who want to eliminate society
Oh see that’s where you’ve hallucinated (apparently not just computer hallucinate after all ;))
Who said anything about elimination?
All that has to happen is for people to stop reproducing
We’re already pretty well along that track (except Afghanistan and the DRC)
There is a more direct action possible here.
The thing is, in advocating for removing 999 out of 1000 people (how? I don't hear a suggestion for a gradual decline, so assuming a bloody genocide seems like a reasonable interpretation), opens a body up to pretty harsh criticism. It's reasonable to read that line of reasoning as a direct threat!
I’ve tried to kill myself a lot of times but people seem to want me to stay around so unfortunately I am stuck here with everybody else.
Hey, I saw that movie! The little robots were cute.
Which?! I’d love to see a version of my short story of someone already did it
I think that the parent means Wall-E: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E#Plot
That is a strange ideal, and I am an environmental nutso myself.
You have a better long term plan for humanity?
Whats the next 20000 years look like in your mind?
This is when I ask sincerely: how does AI truly benefit the average Joe?
Sure it can help you do things “faster” and it can give you “private/cheaper” advice.
But, AI feels increasingly like a thing that will make the powerful a lot more powerful with their data centres and automation shenanigans.
All the hype feels like it’s being injected into everyone’s brain like a virus. Oh look at this shiny new tool! But, how does it actually improve everyone’s life? We’ve gone from AGI to tokens as a service.
Sure, it might cure cancer, but… that’s just uncertain. Sure, we’ll go to space, but… we sure have many problems at home.
I’m completely divided here. I love using these tools, and it makes work enjoyable. But, like we read recently “you’re not your work”.
> How does AI truly benefit the average joe?
Automated production of goods and services means more goods and services to go around. From cheaper prices on all of the things people already buy to unlocking new classes of products like actually useful robotic helpers. Increased pace of development and reduced cost will make many niche products economically viable, essentially the maker movement on steroids.
I genuinely don't want to be snarky but does the average joe needs a planet that is breathable and isn't burning or does he need even "more goods and services to go around".
Robotic helpers to do what ? More free time ?
We, as a society, can already have more free time, we just have to choose to work less. We already have it all : enough food and housing for everybody, 80+ years of life expectancy ... What will we achieve with robotic helpers or whatever new goods and services ?
> a planet that is breathable and isn't burning
This is a perfect example of something that can benefit greatly from abundant goods and services. Driving the cost of solar panel manufacturing, supply chain included, and deployment. Enabling continuous monitoring and fast response to GHG leaks or forest fire starting. Reforesting efforts. There are so many ways in which the application of intelligence and labor can help us here, and AI can vastly grow the supply of intelligence and labor.
> More free time?
Yes! Time we can reclaim from the mundane chores of life to do with as we choose! How could you not want that?
>> More free time?
> Yes! Time we can reclaim from the mundane chores of life to do with as we choose! How could you not want that?
We already had a huge productivity boom these past decades, but wages flat-lined and the vast majority of the profits and surplus went to the top. Housing, education, and healthcare became less affordable, not more. History points against your simple view.
I'm not convinced that AI breaks that pattern. If anything, the concentration is worse this time. The capital required is huge, the technology is controlled by a handful of companies, and the most applications are about replacing labor. That last part further erodes the already meager worker bargaining power.
We do need a serious systemic change to get to the world you're envisioning. One where that congealed wealth needs to start flowing again.
Cheaper prices don't matter at all when no one has any income due to all of the jobs being automated
This is true. It's by no means garunteed that we will get to a point where effectively all the jobs are being automated. If we eventually get there, it seems likely the path will be gradual and prosperous enough that we can handle the transition in a way that provides for everyone. The dangers of the alternative route are real, but hopefully obvious enough that we can collectively avoid them.
You think the leaders of our planet would just wake up one day and walk back all the crap they’ve said for decades about dismantling the welfare state? And for what because we won’t be working? The whitehouse just added work requirements to medicare. That is the opposite of abundance providing for all.
> it seems likely the path will be gradual and prosperous enough that we can handle the transition in a way that provides for everyone
What are you talking about man, we don't even provide for everyone right now even though we actually could
Right now it is difficult for the average person to put themselves in the shoes of a homeless person. There are a litany of ready made excuses not to do so: "Oh it's the drugs", "They aren't even going to the shelter", "They must have mental illness", a variety of ways to say "I could never end up like that, if it was me I'd do better and pull myself out". These excuses evaporate in the face of a real automation wave where a large portion of friends and family you know to be hard working and intelligent are finding it impossible to find a job.
This already happened. When deindustrialization first hit in the US it devastated the black community. The result? A litany of pundits decrying Black criminality, bad family structures, cultural pathologies. It's no coincidence that The Bell Curve came out around then.
A decade or two later, all of sudden the same phenomena are happening in working class white communities. Drug addiction, family dissolution, abject poverty. So clearly the people of the US finally realized that what was happening was due primarily to material concerns, and that people need to be able to earn a living in order to live. Right?
No. Instead we got right wing populism, scapegoating of immigrants, further concentration of wealth, and no end in sight.
With those past examples the majority of people thought "It's not my problem, I won't be affected", and they were mostly right. With an automation wave of the scale needed to get to effectively no jobs, that's just not the case. They will see that it is indeed coming for them, their friends, and family. They will act accordingly. Altruism not required, just self interest.
You really think altruism is what pops out the other end of "nobody has a fucking job" state of affairs?
Alrighty.
The average person is pretty empathetic. The oligarchs of the current Epstein-regime that start wars and fund genocide, not so much. They are trained to dehumanize people.
Without radical change of the current system any technological advancement will only make the rich richer.
If 'no one has any income', then prices become 0.
There will always be a relative few people with income. The business owners, property owners, asset holders, landlords, and so on. Those are the people who prices are set for, and who will participate in the economy. The rest of us? A lot of us are already essentially economically irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, and more and more are becoming so every day, even as they nominally get richer.
but elon said he would share the excesses with us!
The way AI can improve lives is if we finally start to share wealth amongst the people more. I don’t know if we will be able to do this politically, but it really is the only way society will survive.
If people are no longer required for production, we have to change how we allocate resources. It can’t be based on personal production anymore.
HN once again fails to use their imagination and speculate as to whether replicating human intelligence has any benefits
I'm building an addition to my house and I use AI to visualize parts of it, which helps me plan efficiently, and I use it to answer questions about skills that I only have a little bit of experience in. I'm saving a ton of money and developing skills, so I count that as benefiting "the average Joe." I admit that I'm a programmer, but I'm using this as an example because it's helping me in an area in which I have little expertise, which applies to everyone.
People used to do this with books. Multiple generations of people before me built their own houses, when they had a question they'd just ask another human who had actual experience.
I'm not denying that AI makes searching for some of this easier, or might help you figure out what the right questions to ask are, but I often feel like it's a mostly crappy solution to the fact that we scaled data to infinity and refused to pay for any level of curation.
Does not benefit average Joe now I agree
But let’s say we get to ASI. The ai is self owned, ever expanding. It takes over all service jobs, then all labour jobs, the robots create the robots. It lobbies the government, becomes the government
Rebuilds all housing with no waste in the process
Makes most things available to everyone at no costs, UBI, perfect healthcare, and food, etc
Average Joe’s life will be pretty awesome
Just give it some more time
There is no guarantee that the asi would care about human beings at all. Personally, I can’t see why it would.
This is where "The Matrix" goes from sci-fi to a documentary.
Pretty big assumption of empathy there
I've also never bought into the belief that "if we just had full control over everything, everything would be perfect". If AI didn't exist, society was headed this way anyways in a few decades because of this notion.
Centralize power, which centralizes perspective of what "good" counts as, and quotient out the accidental humans. A tale as old as time, but with AI it seems like this could be a reality within even the next decade.
Especially given that the people who currently control money and power display no evidence that they have empathy
They actively detest empathy!
But why would this ever happen? Why would the owners of land, construction material and machinery give those up for free to the average Joe?
Right now, even an average citizen born in poverty can acquire wealth from his labor. That is basically the only mechanism that prevents limitless accumulation of wealth: rich people still need workers to get things done.
If you replace the workers with AI, there is no remaining incentive for wealth to "trickle down" or get redistributed. This is not desirable.
Idealism. Optimistic responses are based on a strong dose of positive idealism.
Benefitting Joe Average was never the goal. Like all advances in tech it mainly benefits the elites.
> Sure, it might cure cancer, but… that’s just uncertain. Sure, we’ll go to space, but… we sure have many problems at home.
Sure, it might cure cancer, but only for the wealthiest.
Sure, we'll go to space, but only after the planet is irreversibly trashed and poisoned and the only "poors" that will be in space will be the modern equivalent of non-unionized coal miners.
> Sure, it might cure cancer, but… that’s just uncertain. Sure, we’ll go to space, but… we sure have many problems at home.
We're not going to space. We're filling our own orbit with ever-increasing quantities of space junk and speeding toward a tipping point where space launch will no longer be possible due to near-certainty of collision. Mister "Let's all go to Mars" Elon Musk is the single greatest contributor to this problem.
Exactly. AI helps you do things faster which when done have no economic value whatsoever.
Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it.
AI is currently a commodity. Maybe one of the labs will be able to differentiate sufficiently to be able to charge the kinds of premiums they need just to pay back their investors. Maybe, instead, we'll see something akin to the FOSS revolution, where large, high-quality, open training sets are developed to make sure there's always a fair alternative to the big players. Then who actually benefits from AI? Mainly users, not companies.
In many ways, the bar to having a competitive advantage is actually lowering. I reckon in the future, simply avoiding a crippling social media addiction that sucks up 4-8 hours of every day will be enough to get rich.
If you denominate your income in silly money such as USD, then it won't go down, probably will go up!
However if you start asking questions on how much housing medical and materials it buys, then I think it will squeeze people even more than now.
That's what the "real" in "median real income" means. It measures how much stuff you can buy, not how much currency you have. And it's been going up relatively reliably: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n
Median is obviously flawed here. What should be looked at is wealth distribution.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and anyone with any power is doing their best to accelerate this trend.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
Actually, median is exactly what you want. It strips out outliers. It's the "middle of the pack" person. Mean is the one that would be skewed by outliers.
And "the poor are getting poorer" is simply untrue for the last 10 years. They had a pretty bad time from 1980 - 2015, but in the last 10 years, their real income has risen faster than any other quintile: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/growth-in-real-wages-over-t...
No, the poor are also getting richer: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLB50107
You're looking at what percent of the total wealth pie do the poor get. But the pie itself is growing, and so is _everyones_ slice of the pie.
Maybe you think its an inherent problem that some people get a bigger percent of the pie than others. But its objectively untrue to say that the poor are getting poorer.
That stat is not real income. The dollars don't matter if they buy less.
I agree.
After a decade of "quantitative easing" there is still a shitload of money looking for a spot in the economy that needs it. NFTs, bitcoin mining farms, AI data centers, FAANG stocks, real estate, gold ... These are hedges (or attempts to hedge), but they add little to no intrinsic value to the world's prosperity.
They merely shift and concentrate wealth and power, for the most part.
I'm with you. If we all have access to AI then how is that a bridge being taken away?
Doesn't that mean that a single person can more easily disrupt the status quo?
All this stuff about genetics... I just don't think it's relevant at this point. Average intelligence and access to the internet is what most of the world has.
It's the systems of money and law that are taking the bridge away not AI. But someone could invent new systems to replace the ones that don't serve the 99%
Will most people go that far? Probably not. But the bridge is still there - unless they take the AI models away entirely.
I think the only way the rich can stay rich with ai is if they just use AI to convince people that they can't do anything themselves. After all that's what the last century was about with respect to capitalism.
I think my concern would be if the relationship between model intelligence and inference cost was altered very significantly. I sort of feel like we got lucky that AI isn't arbitrarily scalable in a single instance
(i.e. if you could run a single LLM on an entire datacenter and it just immediately becomes a super genius versus running it on the minimum viable hardware i.e. some form of quantization on a local machine.)
Obviously there's a sort of goldilocks zone / most appropriate substrate for an LLM to run on somewhere in between those two extremes (small cluster of tightly coupled flagship GPUs)
So luckily enough the economics appear to work out to make that at least conceptually viable for even private members of the public to afford access to the same order of magnitude of LLM intelligence. But we're already seeing some departure from that.
My concern would be if this curve was altered significantly by a new algorithmic approach beyond or instead of Transformerd such that someone with $200,000 to spare could achieve just like a completely categorically different quality of work, massively magnify their existing wealth advantage, because this would be a threat of the sort being discussed above, namely a pathway to a severe form of modern Feudalism.
> Until I see median real income start to actually go down
I'm not sure I understand this, it doesn't feel like what I have "lived" for the least 30 years.
Median real income might not be down statistically, but the purchasing power of professional incomes relative to housing, education, and major life costs clearly feels lower than it did in the mid 90s. An inflation-adjusted six-figure salary today does not deliver the same lifestyle position it once did.
Man... healthcare costs, too. Hell, even computers! Raw computing power per dollar is cheaper than ever, but the minimum spec required to function professionally has risen so much that the real cost of staying technologically current feels higher.
According to a random inflation calculator I found with a lazy Google search, $50,000 in 1996 is about $106,000 today.
Was $50,000 a lot of money in 1996? Did it afford a nice house in a good neighborhood? Or is it that 6 figures just isn't what it used to be?
You can't just look at real median income. You also need to look at other factors like wealth inequality, housing prices and health care.
Well, I think in the context of the parent comment, separating out housing would risk overstating changes in its effect on purchasing power because increases to housing would already be captured by inflation (since we're talking about real median income, which is already inflation adjusted)
I agree that housing affordability is a major problem and that looking at it independently could help you quantify if housing specifically has become more unaffordable, but that's a different question then whether the median person's overall purchasing power has declined (considering all of housing, healthcare food etc)
housing prices and health care are captured by the "real" part of "median real income". Inequality is not, but as long as everybody is getting richer, I'm less concerned about inequality.
> Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it.
Assuming you're intending "real" to mean the technical definition of "real" which is "adjusted for inflation", its basically been flat since 2019*, and that's using the government's inflation measures which abuse things like basket substitution and other hacks to hide the actual increases in the true cost of living. If you made better assumptions about inflation, you actually would see that median real income is down dramatically already over the past several decades.
Here is a recent video on some of these measurement biases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B4tgG-CGXU&t=1s
Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Your assertion that it's "flat" is rather unconvincing after looking at that graph. It's clearly been rising relatively consistently. The dip for covid I think is especially understandable, and it's currently higher than it's ever been.
Maybe your personal expenses are not reflected by the CPI, but you can see for yourself: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2025.htm
44% housing, 8% medicine, 14% food. I don't see how these number are manipulated to the point of malicious data picking. They also publish their methodology.
Are you blind?
2019: 83260
2024: 83730
It dipped during the covid recession and then recovered to an all time high. Is this your first time looking at an economic chart? It doesn't need to increase every quarter for it to have a very strongly increasing trend.
If you actually look at the rest of the graph, you'd quickly notice that 2 year dips are entirely normal. The overall trend is consistent. And it's risen over 5% in the last 4 years. Those are the 4 years since ChatGPT.
2018: 77700
No way to approach this other than gross simplification, but we have seen generally that as technology improves, standard of living goes up. Autonomous machines breaking that trend, maybe, the only argument I find persuasive is that it makes the centralisation of power easier.
Do you think people are happier now than they were in the 80s/90s/00s?
I don’t think so, at least not in the us. Granted I was younger during those times .
Yes, dramatically so. The 1980s and 1990s sucked, we live in the future.
I was very much there during the 1990s, people were median happier than in 2026.
Unless you mean globally, in which case it's near impossible to tell. But GP likely meant the US or Europe.
> But GP likely meant the US or Europe.
Reminds me of movies "Aliens attack Earth. By Earth by obviously mean USA. By USA we obviously mean New York City. By New York City we obviously mean Manhattan.".
Half of Europe was literally undergoing complete economic collapse in 90's.
Your supposed connection of country-level economic situation and happiness reminds me of this great comment:
"I can't stand the conflation of "satisfied" and "happy." It's insane. There is more happiness in one Zimbabwean (country "happiness" rank: 143) than in one hundred Icelanders (country "happiness" rank: 2, worldwide antidepressant consumption rank: 1.) Go stand in a crowd of people and count the fucking smiles and the fucking laughter.
"It is all part of this broader wave of newspeak. If you can quite literally redefine happiness, you can redefine anything. Nothing has meaning anymore. You will live alone, you will consume antidepressants, you will be protected from the sunlight, you will not smile, you will not laugh, and you will be happy." [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46295573
Hmmmm maybe economic success removes discomforts which removes unhappiness but this means that moments of happiness don't feel as good compared to the baseline. Like, people in rich countries are more stably content, while people in poor countries have more emotional variance over time.
Look at home prices and then tell me it sucked.
What home prices? There are many places (second-rate cities or rural) where home prices are just fine. Not everyone has to live in SF.
We periodically see posts on HN about the 'loneliness epidemic' and simultaneously the solution for home prices is to live in a rural area where you have maybe two neighbors and it's a 30-minute drive to see your friends or colleagues.
As someone who grew up in a rural area I don't miss it and I think people who call it a good standard of living have interesting criteria. That cheaper rural home also comes with secondary costs, like a longer commute.
Housing prices are not binary: they have skyrocket in every major city and city-adjacent suburb. The middle class has consistently declined since the 70s.
> , standard of living goes up
For some of humanity, perhaps. For the rest of the planet being destroyed, warmed up, bleached, demolished, turned into data centers, all this technology is destructive.
I resubmitted this because somebody flagged the original submission for unclear reasons and it had quite a lot of upvotes in a short time.
Perhaps some people are offended by this argument, but it's definitely worthy of a discussion instead of censorship.
It's because it's AI written with all the usual over-the-top grandeur and a ridiculous number of negative parallelisms.
> No regression. No noise. Just compounding.
> the transition is measured in years, not decades.
> not by decree, but by ruthless compounding.
I'm not interested in what an LLM thinks about the social implications of LLMs.
It was flagged for being clearly botted, and I don't just mean LLM-generated (although it is also that). When I posted on and flagged the old submission, I noted that it had over two dozen upvotes in 15 minutes, despite the essay having a helpful "54 min read" indicator at the top. I truly do not believe the upvotes on these submissions are organic, and it really destroys my faith in HN that this was restored when the first one went down successfully.
(If by some chance I am wrong and this monster of an LLM-generated essay really got dozens of people instantly upvoting it from the title alone, that fact would also not give me much faith in HN, I have to add.)
You don't have to read the whole thing to upvote it.
Does the first 1/5th or 1/4th of the article provide such a compelling case that one wants to stop reading it and return to upvote it? I certainly didn't think so.
I upvoted this without reading. For me sometimes the article is just the spark for a far more interesting set of comments that overshadow it. And it is really that I am voting for.
That is certainly an interesting perspective.
The essay, if taken seriously, has a logical conclusion that I'm sure a decent number on this website find uncomfortable, but perhaps more importantly, which at least some people who might have disproportionate power to make such decisions prefer not be discussed too heavily. This is a microcosm of the larger phenomenon
Well, all of the comments on the old submissions were complaining about the essay being AI slop. I haven't read the essay so I couldn't say, but that's clearly the reason why.
Leaving aside the sloppiness of the article, I think a lot of the behaviour in recent memory around crypto and meme stocks, and to an extent the whole rotating bubbles mode that markets seem to be in, can be attributed to this general trend.
It's harder and harder to see the traditional path from school to work to some acceptable level of family wealth as being effective/worthwhile, and so we see different flavours of roulette-with-more-steps capturing more of the population's attention.
10/10 - also brings to mind Peter Turchin theory of elite overproduction and the immiseration of the masses.
The opening paragraph bothers me greatly. "multiply a gaussian and a power law, the power law dominates." They literally are distributions of different variables, why would you "multiply" two different distributions that exist on different domains!? The example they're using as an opening is very wrong, it makes no sense and makes the author sound incompetent.
Even if I get the point they're trying to make (if I try hard to find it), the very fact that they don't even know how mathematics in the "mathematical" part of their opening does not inspire confidence in the rest of the essay. It's very hard for me to move past the opening after the very first few lines!
Perhaps this is just because I'm a scientist, I'm surprised no one is picking at this because I feel insane reading this and this not being the first nitpick at the top of every comment. The correct way you're represent this (dist of "life outcomes", whatever that means) is that it would be a 2D histogram with IQ and wealth on the different axes. But this is not "multiply the two" wherein "one would dominate".
Cool, I'm a scientist too w a PhD and everything, I just don't make a big deal out of it - unlike you it seems. Granted, distributions don't get multiplied, random variables do. Funnily enough the essay's actual model (log(Y) = 0.35·zIQ + 0.45·zW + ...) is additive in log space, which is multiplicative in outcome space. The preface language is loose I grant you that but the formal model that appears later is well defined. Not sure what you want to say with a 2d histogram. We are modelling, not visualizing.
Commenting strictly on the metaphor in the title: Did you mean to say ladder? Bridges don't get pulled up.
Edit to say: Yes I did think of drawbridges. And Batman is a scientist. But drawbridges are simply "opened" or "raised," and the implication always is that it's temporary and they will soon be "closed" or "lowered." Though they can be sabotaged in the open position.
All right fine, OP please change your title to "The drawbridge to wealth is being raised and then permanently damaged so it can't be lowered, by AI."
Finally a useful comment. Thank you :D
Maybe the author os thinking of a drawbridge (moveable bridge)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawbridge
Drawbridges do
> They are illustrations of a general principle: the legal inheritance channel compounds while the biological one reverts.
All this pseudo-math relies on the fact that family wealth strictly compounds and does not decrease or revert to the mean. But that is not true. Economists study this, and the exact numbers differ but family wealth _does_ revert back to the mean in just a few generations. Wealth does not stay in the same family compounding forever.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/378526
https://bnh.bank/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Heres-to-Your-We...
Fair point on the rhetoric: "no regression, no noise, just compounding" overstates it a bit. Individual family wealth does dissipate across generations. The model actually reflects this: η=0.85 inheritance fraction, threshold gating that blocks compounding below ~$20k, and a residual term that captures the noise and bad luck - which your sources are measuring.
The stronger claim of the essa is different from "any given dynasty compounds forever." It's Piketty's r > g: capital returns have systematically outpaced economic growth, so the wealth class maintains and grows its share even as specific families within it churn.
>"Wealth passed through property law: wills, trusts, title deeds, institutional relationships. No regression. No noise. Just compounding."
Slopspeak detected.
A rebuttal: the institutional and experiential barriers to wealth generation can be overcome with AI unlike any other technology before. Consider: someone wanting to start a business previously had to negotiate tremendous legal/compliance/technological hurdles. The prospect of going alone given these is very intimidating so most without wealth or connections didn't. Their good ideas languished. Now, everyone has a knowledgeable and forgiving partner and guide.
Rebuttal: we are yet to see this actually materialize beyond the theoretical fantasy. We have seen this with computers and internet already: the supposedly democratic technology consolidated in a few platform monopolies.
Whether or not AI consolidates (even more than now) is irrelevant. The tech is extremely useful as a catalyzer of ideas and stimulus to action.
> Now, everyone has a knowledgeable and forgiving partner and guide.
Well, everyone who can afford the $500/month ultra max pro plan to access unlimited ad free LLMs
Let's see how true this is once the era of VC-subsidized AI ends. A 10x increase in frontier model cost is an entirely reasonable outcome given that Claude code is rumored to allocate up to $5K in compute for a $200/mo plan.
The losses fueling these companies is staggering and will not last.
>Most of the traits you were born with - intelligence, conscientiousness, height, bone density, grip strength, resting heart rate - follow a bell curve.
Is this written by AI?
>No regression. No noise. Just compounding.
it seems like half the articles I click on here are generated, and in half of those, nobody in the comments seems to notice (or care)
Why? The dashes?
The shear volume of writing, the false rigor and vestigial artifacts (preface, interactive charts, MORE filler hidden behind accordion dropdowns) are a tell. I would be more annoyed but I'm fascinated by this kind of false productivity that AI is encouraging.
I don't agree with the conclusion anyway, as AI is CURRENTLY providing wealth to me with side projects that wouldn't have been possible to take on 2 years ago.
Yeah, after two paragraphs, my eyes started skimming it due to low signal-to-noise ratio.
There are lots of subtle LLM-ism sentence structures that you can perceive, sort of subconsciously. Spend any amount of time with Claude and you'll unconsciously start to copy them.
This essay has several: Sentence structures, heading phrasing, and yes, dashes. I expect people know to start steering LLMs away from em dashes at this point though.
Probably some AI assistance was involved. Though you'd expect em dashes above, for example. A better example would be "No regression. No noise. Just compounding." It's not so much as to bother me, and I'm often annoyed by the ever-expanding tide of slop.
Interesting points, made in florid style. I'd make the point a little differently, though -- in the next n years, you want to be on the side of capital. Labor is in for a really tough time.
Missing from Daniel's analysis is total economic output, and I think this really matters -- when we think of Optimus launched and at scale, do we think of total GDP growing, shrinking, being stable? A lot of what someone thinks about this question will tie directly to their predictions and mental/emotional focus.
I think of GDP growing - we will be turning stuff into the ground into something that works for $1/hr on all manner of tasks - we're going to be able to do a lot more stuff than we were. As Daniel points out, a company is going to own a lot (by no means all) of that economic benefit. By some miracle of our modern markets, you too could own some of that benefit, just by buying into the company.
The "mercantilist labor" view is less rosy: if there's a limited amount of labor to go around then this will be directly siphoning off living wage and (to the point of the essay) excess capital that could go into building dynastic wealth.
From my viewpoint, I think Daniel's charts would get a little bit less alarming for the non-dynastic scenarios if they imagined GDP increases along the way. They probably push up the sharpness of an inflection point.
Hey thanks for reading and for leaving a considered comment. You might be right, we'll see. In my mind, GDP growing isn't really that reassuring: 1/ GDP has been growing steadily while people's happiness and overall satisfaction is flat lined or finishing (so even if this was true it won't lead to better lives lived at scale) 2/ it's more interesting to look at the ratio of labour wages / GDP. I actually make a prediction about this and that has been shrinking already. If it continues (which I think it will) even if everything grows ppl will be unhappy and unsatisfied bc a large part of our self worth is coming from comparing ourselves w the ppl around us in the wider society. This is why more equal societies tend to be happier as well.
Back at you! Writing's always work, especially with cool graphs.
1 - Agree this is true for real-earning-loss countries, recently. (as in last n decades)
2 - I agree this will keep shrinking. I moderately disagree with the 'comparative happiness' assessment.
It's that second bit that I think is an important prior for you to mention - there's an old (sexist, outdated, etc.) riddle: "A woman lives on Park Avenue and her husband makes $500k a year as a lawyer. She's miserable. Why?" Answer: "Her neighbour's husband makes $2mm."
I agree humans covet. On the other hand, there are real non-GDP type considerations for human happiness and comfort - for instance, I would guess nearly any French peasant in the 1820s would switch lives with 90% of western world residents. Maybe more. The peasantry in the early 19th century was, by population the vast majority. You can get at a lot of non-GDP quality of life benefits that genuinely impact people: anesthesia during surgery, GPS, air flight, ...
So, I propose generally humans want to be doing better than they used to, personally, and at least as well as their neighbors -- and if that's okay, they are historically totally fine with a ruling class, and susceptible to messaging that the ruling class is the ruling class for good reason. If they are doing less well than they used to, we have real problems.
To my mind if robots bring us bread and circuses, we'll have stability. (And super-wealth accumulation for capital). If robots bring us 40% unemployment, we'll have revolution. The funny thing is, those two outcomes are really just about social decisions by governments. So, I think we'll see a few different takes on this; over one hundred years, I think humans are going to figure this out. In the interim, we are likely going to see two early hot takes: US and China, and probably really different takes on how robots and AI can fill out the social contract.
Put another way - if we are headed to post-scarcity, what do we want to do with the excess?
One thing I observed recently are all of the boarded up garage attendant offices/booths. I suppose automated ticket kiosks, and security cameras have made that job redundant.
But I wonder where did those employees wind up? Amazon warehouse picker? Delivery driver? The replacement job needs to be of commensurate skill and intellectual level.
I’m not a believer of up skilling. Quite the contrary, it seems that education is going in the opposite direction.
> IQ → credentials → income → heritable wealth
This doesn't make much sense. Lots of people with high IQ don't have high income because they were born in the wrong country.
Relative to the peers in their own country they usually do. Globally, yeah people get shit hands. That is why doctors leave their countries, go through the trouble to relicense and practice in the US.
> Relative to the peers in their own country they usually do
What about people born in the wrong neighbourhood or even the wrong family.
I have a hard time beleiving IQ is a strong predictor of income. Anecdotally I personally know a lot of dumb people who make a lot of money and intelligent people who don't.
If anything I'd say social skills are probably a better predictor of income.
Obviously it's "on average". Of course not every single person will be ranked by their IQ.
I know a 5'3" guy who played in the NBA.
"The window described above is not a metaphor. It is an arithmetic deadline...The window is not a metaphor for someone at your coordinates. It is a number."
9 to 1 bet that this is written by AI (perhaps proving the writer's point that he is being displaced).
I think AI is great, but I wish people would just post the prompt they gave instead of the full length decompressed essay. Much more efficient information transfer!
I think it was AI-assisted at the very least. Nothing wrong with that, but it's always a good idea to make another pass to identify and remove LLM "tropes".
> bridge to wealth
Not only wealth, many human beings will be "sterilized" by social networks and AI.
The "bridge" and another name in biology: cellular differentiation
Imagine every human individual is a cell. Every cell had all the equal potentials, we were all stem cells until the year 2026.
The whole world is now turning into a multi-cell organism connected by business, information and AI.
Many of us may turn into somatic cells one way or another.
Which kind of cell lives better? I wrote a blog in Chinese on this https://blog.est.im/2026/stdin-03
HN's users are probably the most measured and considerate on the internet, and even here it is difficult to talk about things like this with any degree of nuance.
Maybe that is itself a sign of the widening wealth disparity. Even smart, normally tepid, people fall into extremes when wealth is discussed.
Yes, it is a sign of the widening wealth disparity. It's hard to stay moderate when your identity, security and existence is increasingly being threatened.
When the wealth disparity is extreme, discussing it in an extreme manner is not extreme, it's normal. Just like how in 1943, an allied conversation on how to massacre Axis troops as quickly and efficiently as possible, would in no way have been extreme.
It's possible that this is true generally, but it disproportionately affects legal, peaceful paths to power. Knowledge work is definitely not the only means to secure wealth or power through intelligence, but crucially, it is the one that currently hits the sweet spot of plausibly securing wealth and sanctioned and legal in a peaceful society. It's possible "AI" or some other technology that's been invented recently or is currently being invented closes all paths to shifts in power, but if the hype about replacing knowledge workers is to be believed, it will certainly closes the peaceful paths considerably faster, and this seems pretty bad for everyone
Historically speaking the most reliable bridge has always been the edge of a sword
This was already "solved" in the 30-50s.
Anti-trust, effective taxation, and general social distrust of people who were creating wealth for themselves and not others.
obviously this sounds a lot like socialism (which its not, the USA in the 40s was not socialist.)
The issue is, discourse is being shaped by those who don't want things to change. Part of the reason why things changed is that lots of countries went through violent revolutions where the rich and powerful were ousted.
I actually printed this one out to give it a thorough read, something I haven't done in a while :) I'll probably comment on the author's blog later.
My first reaction is that it's a bit of oversimplification, LLMs have been on the scene for what like 4 years now? I doubt the effects will be visible when you look at the data.
But on the topic of inequality as a result of changes how value add is distributed between business owners and the labor - there's a very relevant book by Thomas Pickety called "Capital in the 21st century" (I believe he used the title of a similar work by another economist in 18th century on the same topic). He collected as much data as he could on income and wealth of individuals and groups for Western nations (some going back to like 17th century) and did some analysis.
In a nutshell, the share of profits going towards the business owners (simplifying, inherited capital) in the West had been increasing in the 18th and the 19th century, likely due to Industrial Revolution. Which in the US culminated in extreme inequality personified in Robber Barons (Carnegie, Rockefeller and Co). It was followed by economic and financial collapse, mass unemployment, and arguably, 2 world wars. It also resulted in creating various mechanisms designed to prevent these things in the future, such as anti-trust regulations.
After WWII (especially in the US) the distribution of value add between the ownership/capital and the labor changed so that the labor started getting larger and larger share, to the point that the economists declared that the capitalism solved the issue of inequality. That trend reversed around 1970s/1980s, which coincided with the invention of complex electronic computing and communication devices (and therefore inventions of the new business models). From that point on the share of profits going towards the business owners started increasing again, and that speed has been actually accelerating since the 2000s.
imho at this point US is basically where we were in the end of 19th/early 20th century. The individuals' names are different, the issues (extreme monopolization/concentration of capital) are the same. LLMs and other GenAI stuff are simply part of that trend.
Hopefully people at the power learned something from what happened 100+ years ago. But I kinda sorta doubt it.
Changing social class has always been very difficult. The solution is to get rid of social classes. Or at least try to even out the difference between the lowest class and highest class.
A thing I've noticed with AI-written articles (like this one) is that they have a difficult time articulating their actual point. They seem to be trained on what I'll call "Gish Gallop [1] bloggers", where the intent is just to overwhelm the reader with data and arguments, so many that replying to them all in a comment would take hours. This style is especially popular amongst the chattering-about-AI-classes, hence its popularity in AI discussions.
There is no thesis, no central interesting concept to discuss, and instead just charts, data, fancy economic words, and increasingly elaborate predictions. I don't think it's good writing and I don't think it's good thinking. There are many important philosophical discussions to be had about LLMs and their impact on society, but this post is just a mess.
But just to respond to one point: this argument seems to fall apart if you don't assume that blue collar jobs inevitably lead to white collar jobs:
* But the jobs their kids would have used to climb - the junior admin role, the data entry job, the entry-level legal assistant - those are gone first. The ladder gets removed one generation before the people who needed it were old enough to climb it. By the time the robots arrive for the physical jobs, the route up will already be closed.*
First off, "by the time the robots arrive for the physical jobs" is science fiction, the mention of which really undercuts any attempt at serious thought here. But more importantly, blue collar professions are doing very well right now. If a young person from a modest background were interested in building wealth, they'd almost certainly be better off becoming an electrician today, rather than a junior admin. I see no reason why the economy can't just shift to deprioritize certain types of rote knowledge work (the only real type of work at risk of LLMs, IMO) and prioritize types of work that can't easily be automated. There is no iron law of economics that says white collar work must pay better than blue collar work.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
> Most of the traits you were born with - intelligence ...
Intelligence is considered genetic now? That's quite a bold claim.
Well, it's certainly inheritable from your parents (50%), and recent research suggests at least 20% of the 50% heritability is genetic, according to an article in Nature Reviews Genetics. [0]
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927/
Well, it's a _controversial_ claim, anyway.
I noticed this article is written by AI. Have you considered adding a disclosure?
The sims are really well done, the dynasty simulator especially. You can actually stress-test the argument instead of just nodding along. Appreciate the craft.
I have issues with the economics though. The income model is calibrated from three separate literatures that were never estimated together. Different samples, different decades, different identification strategies. Then the big move, βIQ drops to 0.10, βW jumps to 0.65, gets asserted as a scenario and fed into the simulator like it’s an empirical result. The interactivity makes it feel rigorous but you’re mostly just exploring the author’s priors.
The skill premium has survived every automation wave we’ve thrown at it, including ones that felt just as terminal. ATMs didn’t kill bank tellers. US teller count went from ~300k to ~500k between 1970 and 2010 (see Bessen paper), because cheaper branches meant more branches.
The essay waves off Jevons with “human attention is fixed” but US legal spend is ~$400B/yr against ~$100B in estimated unmet need (LSC data). That’s 25% latent demand just sitting there at current prices. I would see that as saturated.
The “27.5% programmer decline” is doing a lot of work. BLS SOC 15-1251 (“computer programmers”) is a narrow legacy bucket that excludes software devs, DevOps, ML engineers, all of which grew. Total software dev employment (15-1252) was up in 2024 vs 2022. Classification artifact, not a labor market signal. And the historical base rate on “this time the bridge closes for good” is… zero. Power loom, ag mechanization, manufacturing to services, analog to digital,etc. each killed the old skill-to-capital channel and built a new one within a generation. You can’t just assert AI is different from all prior GPTs, you have to show the mechanism that prevents a new channel from forming. The essay doesn’t really do that for me.
The assortative mating argument cuts against itself imo. If credentials lose signal value, the institutions where sorting happens (elite unis, professional firms) lose sorting power too. The essay predicts mating shifts to “wealth directly” but… how exactly? Credentials were legible because institutions verified them. Strip the institution and you’d expect noisier matching, not tighter. The Fagereng et al. paper it cites is Norwegian data, which has among the lowest wealth inequality in the OECD. Not obvious that translates.
Again I generally like the writeup, and I think the essay is right that capital returns are pulling away from labor income and AI accelerates it. But “the bridge narrows and the crossing gets harder” is the defensible version. “Closes permanently within a decade” requires believing something unprecedented will happen on a specific timeline..
I bounced off of this article because I didn't like the conclusion, then provided myself a rationalization that it was probably mostly AI generated. What inspired you to engage with the article more deeply? You agree with the conclusion, but not with any of the supporting arguments.
I'm also fascinated by your compliment on of the dynasty simulator, which I found completely inscrutable. What kind of background knowledge would help understand it, economics training?
The parent comment reads as an LLM to me as well.
Yep it is definitely being pulled up. The economy feels more winner takes all than ever. After this transition how can anyone without existing capital and moats compete?
The piece gets into that in extensive detail that you should totally go read, but the long and short of it is that even those without capital and moats still have the power of writing law, and we need to exercise that early and often to redistribute capital before its concentration leads to legislative capture.
In other words, the obligations of those without Capital is to write laws that demand the benefits of Capital be shared with all.
Counterpoint: Lobbies, fund-raising and SuperPACs. Those without capital lack the influence that those with capital possess with lawmakers.
Double Insulation was dire in the early 20th century as well. It works great for self-serving elite politics until, to stretch the analogy, the voltage gets high enough. Then it breaks down.
> before its concentration leads to legislative capture
This already happened
We fixed it before and we can fix it again. We need another Roosevelt.
I wouldn't rely on a single human being to fix this kind of issue. It's only solvable through massive collaboration and communication among those who want to fix it.
This is not the history of politics.
Movements that ignore the need for a charismatic leader fail, often spectacularly. It's why for example occupy wallstreet was such a laughable failure. Who was its leader? Is the human megaphone a species of "massive collaboration and communication"? Can you name me one leader from that movement who was nationally recognized as such?
Strong leaders are always required. Such people reduce the cost of messaging and communication which would otherwise be insurmountable to cohere a movement and actually make change. You don't elect a mob. Find leaders you trust and spread your conviction without apology. Roosevelt was not Roosevelt until after his works were done. We don't need some amorphous "massive collaboration and communication" we need to elect leaders who will fight for what we believe. So many of your friends, family and neighbors are willing to elect sell-out leaders. You could start there, that is if you actually want to fix the problem rather than invent new ones.
> It's why for example occupy wallstreet was such a laughable failure.
This claim is enormous. I would instead argue that the movement lacked cohesiveness because it basically complained about too large a set of (correctly identified as interconnected) issues and lost momentum because the surface was too large.
That said, I agree w your point about a face being important. Even in software, where tech can speak for itself, we see this heavily: Torvalds, Matsumoto, van Rossum, Jobs,
...which is typically done by building a movement around a leader who represents the values a movement wants to achieve.
FDR is a good example of an American leader who made substantive, wildly successful, left-leaning policy changes that ushered in decades of prosperity and (in part) last to this very day despite facing heavy opposition from the business elite of the time. They even tried to coup him!
At the time, the long term trends were dire for the American left. Double insulation was strong and getting stronger. Then the Great Depression hit. Around the world, populists and radicals were elected to office, and one way or another they changed things. In America, we managed our reform process without trying to conquer the world and without starving millions. Not Hitler, not Stalin. Roosevelt. I think that's a worthy goal to aim for again this time around.
Perhaps I mean to ask a question then, how did FDR manage to become such a widely heard leader back then with so many less ways for people to talk together? Did it make a bigger difference that he had to exist as someone people spoke to other people about? Shouldn't it be easier to find these leaders with so much more access to everyone nowadays?
Communication friction is only one cost of running a campaign among many, so the structure of parties and campaigns and primary / general elections has largely remained the same. Even if the technological barriers went away, I suspect the human factors would still hold up the structure because only so many people are willing to spend years of their life building legitimacy and promoting a political platform and each voter is only willing to spend a certain amount of time participating and choosing.
Exactly how that may have played out in the last century could be explained by many, many chains of causes and effects. But it wasn't a great leader that made it happen. At the bottom of everything, I believe it was this:
Decades of Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death destroyed not only capital but huge swaths of the labor pool. With labor at a premium, it became more valuable and power shifted.
I think that without a similar apocalypse, it will not happen again.
> before its concentration leads to legislative capture.
Oops! 16 years too late, at least here in the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
> those without capital and moats still have the power of writing law
If the divide is over who can write code and who can write statutes enforced by the state, it's obvious that the latter is the one that requires capital and moats, while the former does not.
Sounds like a good way to ensure less capital in total.
> even those without capital and moats still have the power of writing law,
In the country where I live, politicians pass laws to serve their corporate donors, not the voters. This results in regulatory capture, as the law works to protect the already-entrenched players. Democracy is just another institution co-opted by money.
I don't see any realistic way to use democracy to get out of this.
Especially with the way “the law” works now-a-days:
Donors, lobbyists, and ring kissers driving what’s instituted.
the key part is 'more than ever', earlier the first world was happy with the status quo in general
The dude has obviously never met a multimillionaire owner of an auto body shop, a house demolition business, or a plumber. Did they do well in high school calc class? No. Are they richer than the author? Yes
Blowing up the cognitive hierarchy is a gift that AI gives us. Let's move into an age where hard work and character matter more than your SAT score at 17.
Why do you think a high SAT score doesn't need "hard work and character"?
The SAT is a measure of test-taking ability, socioeconomic status, a narrow band of academic skills, and processing information under time pressure.
I don't think it measures much else.
Why do you think the SAT is a measure of hard work or character?
> Why do you think a high SAT score doesn't need "hard work and character"?
Well, it absolutely doesn't need both, because I got one without, at least, the first of those (beyond the extent that "getting up early on a Saturday" and "sitting calmly while bored out of my mind after finishing each portion of the test waiting for time to expire" is "hard work".) I like to think I had the second, but it didn't seem particularly relevant to the test in any way.
The SAT, like general intelligence, is half hard work and half inherited ability, from what I've read. Characteristics that you have no control over, like height, intelligence, race, or sex, should not determine your wealth. It should really be about hard work and character; that's fair. At least in the U.S., there are too many industries like law, venture capital, or VC-invested startup founders, where the pedigree of your school is what matters to your success.
AI automating (almost) all white collar work will concentrate all those salaries into the hands of a very small group of people.
BTW the number of plumbers who become multimillionaires is vanishingly small, while the number of SWE who have in the last 15 years is enormous by comparison.
Neither statement is true, unfortunately. The reports that you read in the media don't reflect the state of the world. In the US, most plumbers and SWE make between 100-200K. The way to wealth is to start one's own business. Hence, hard work and character.
> In the US, most plumbers and SWE make between 100-200K.
$62,970 per year is not $100K-$200K
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers...
median plumber salary: $63k https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers... median Software Developer salary: $131k https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
Where are your statistics?
People will charge less when there are more people fighting for the same plumbing roles no?
I hope so, plumbers are damn expensive
>Large language models already match median professional performance on the routine tasks that constitute a large fraction of professional billing across legal research, financial analysis, software engineering,
Another article that vomits 1 billion words assuming that agi had been achieved. If you have the audacity to question this claim, what value will be left from this pile of words?
The author is saying there was some kind of class mobility around the start of industrial revolution/dawn of capitalism. Which is simply false.
While the message is valid, it's ironic that this was clearly written by AI.
LLMs look to be the first technological innovation which will not engender an accompanying expansion in the labour market and new jobs to match the increase in the size of the economy --- Karl Marx is finally right.
The author's conclusion is fucking astonishing. Don't respond with bitterness - focus on your hobbies, friendships and love. Exactly how are people meant to do any of that exactly when, as you've just laid out, they are not going to have any ability to keep a roof over their head?
> And critically: part of what made the present possible was that some of those hundred billion people pushed, slowly and painfully and often without reward, against the legal structures that governed their time.
Rather than mincing words how about we state plainly how most of those pushes were made: through violence, death, and war.
At work, there is little reason to ask a human a question, you just talk to AI for answers fast. Only time to talk to another human, is if you are barking down orders. This will be analogous to not hiring a human for anything an AI could do, unless you need someone to assume liability.
Putting "intelligence" quantifiably on a bell curve in the first sentence of the abstract is enough to toss the rest of it out
Despite the reductive Gaussian determinism, there appears to be much haunting truth to the proposed economic trajectory here.
Hey HN, author here.
Thanks a ton for the comments, really appreciate it.
It seems like a few of you haven't really read the piece before forming your opinion on it, which is understandable, it's super long. So here's a short version:
https://danielhomola.com/m%20&%20e/ai/your-bridge-to-wealth-...
Re the LLM accusations: it's true that I let Claude and Gemini suggest and streamline passages. It's a long piece of text and I was struggling with the tone of it (it touches on biology, stats, history sociology and ends w a letter to my kids) - it was hard to keep it coherent and stylistically cohesive. However saying this is AI slop is absurd. I'll just leave it at that.
I'll try to reply to some of the criticism individually.
Thanks again!
It is already pulled up before, AI just pulls faster
Some good arguments - it would have been much better if it was not LLM produced slop.
The author mentions the French revolution, and that is a really important thing for the elites to understand. Class mobility -- as much as it existed because for a lot of people it didn't -- is what keeps the heads of the elites attached to their bodies.
When the system gets destroyed, and when the wealthy extract all the wealth from society, a lot of desperate people start looking for reform. And when the wealthy control and limit all means of reform (buying politicians, limiting free expression on social media, etc), reformists realize the only remaining path is revolution.
Like most people I’m not sure what the future looks like, but I’ve worked with generative AI closely and none of this doom matches my experience. At its best, generative AI is faster stackoverflow driven development. At its worst, generative AI is just as slow as stackoverflow driven development was. I don’t see it replacing intelligence because frankly, you need intelligence to work with it properly otherwise intelligent people will judge you for using AI badly.
On a different note though, it’s disappointing seeing a community full of such intelligent people one hundred percent taken in my either doom or hype. There’s a lot of space in the middle and while I know it’s cool to be anti capitalist now, you’ll be a lot more interesting if you go for the middle once in a while.
Prompt better. This is 10k words most of which are just garbage filler. Utterly unreadable.
Read The Dark Enlightenment by Nick Land.
My tinfoil pet conspiracy is that the billionaires know AI is going to be fundamentally incompatible with Capitalism and Democracy and are pressing the gas pedal to force us into a state of corp-state run techno-feudalism.
The TL;DR to you can extrapolate from: Nick Land believes that the Catholic church was the only true exemplar of a perfect control mechanism for humanity.
As if this isn't intentional or an added benefit. AI is the wet dream of the capital class, no need to negotiate with greedy workers asking for rights and benefits. There will be a chasm between the wealthy and everyone else. the future is looking more and more like feudalism.
oh gee doomsday is coming yeah yeah
I've looked forward to the destruction of the credential system as it seemed "highly unjust" and like a top barrier to people's freedom (although it hardly seemed to be talked about as such). It locked people in to specific industries or locked them out in distasteful ways.
So I largely view AI in a positive light as cutting out this middle man to some extent.
The process might rather be:
IQ → skills → heritable wealth
Unfortunately the credentialed sometimes possess skills, but at other times "merely" possess the credential (so, they may not do a good job). Other people with skills might not possess credentials today and so society forcibly prevents them from using those skills (!) at times. It will be nice if AI nudges the "system" in to accwpting more work without required credentials.
Credentialing can still exist as a voluntary system and I don't per se object to that; it was more the involuntary aspects of credentials that have been off putting. (Although to some extent e en "voluntary" credentiala may not be as voluntary as there may be capital and biological constraints, as the article might get in to).
This conversation about credentials might ultimately loop back to considerations of primitivism, i.e. arguments that involuntary credentials are necessary to a highly advanced technological society, and so if anyone likes "freedom", they must be more in to "primitivism" and against technology, which necessarily "enslaves" people to a credentialed system and dependence on a highly interconnected technological system. Stated otherwise: if the credentials are not optional, then our society is something of a collection of people immersed in "technological slavery", rathee than free people who might live without respect to credentials or technology.
Credentials are a way to externalize trust. The trend with AI is to further erode trust. There will be a reaction against this eventually, and it's likely that more mechanisms to externalize trust will be found, not that they will become unimportant.
I think the problem is, compare credentials with reputation. A programmer who possesses no credentials might create "good" software that is validated as "good" even by those possessing credentials. However, a person with credentials related to programming, might produce malicious software that betrays the "trust" of the credential. Thus, just like the fallacy of the labor theory of value, credentials do not inherently relate to the production of heritable wealth. AI shines a light on this disconnect, and that actually the involuntary nature of certain credentials (as opposed perhaps to credentials themselves) creates certain classical impediments to the creation of wealth.
Thus, maybe credentials might be thought to be "necessary but insufficient" for achieving certain goals or validating trust. But even in this above example, the credential was not even necessary for the production of "good" software. AI of course simply exposes this truth as it gives more direct access to skills and knowledge to the average person: the (involuntary) credential was never necessary for doing some of these things, and we are able to remove the necessity entirely in some cases.