The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI(danielhomola.com) |
The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI(danielhomola.com) |
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.
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.
I don't know of any required credential to write software or be a programmer.
When I think about credentials, I think about doctors and lawyers. In both cases, I'm going to demand that the people I work with are credentialed, and there is no way that I'm going to change that.
Can you give a specific example of something that requires a credential today that you would like to see relaxed?
I have no problem with you wanting your doctors or lawyers to have credentials for your own needs
I take issue with people requiring me to seek doctors or lawyers with credentials, as that then has set up a compulsory system which reduces the quality and quantity of law and medicine produced, which has predictably created things like doctor shortages today (see news stories on doctor shortages)
So AI will fill some of these shortages if there aren't burdensome regulations put in place to prevent it from doing so (such as regulations that currently exist)
It's been very difficult in part because 150+ years of Marxist tradition has not been able to define what a class is. Upwards social mobility by other metrics such as wealth and income, both intra- and inter-generation, is actually provable and real.
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.
Intelligence is considered genetic now? That's quite a bold claim.
Combine that with disillusioned poor strata electing right-wingers in hopes of solving inequality via xenophobia, but afterwards getting autocrats who are only interested in the personal enrichment and burning wealth ladder even faster, plus blocking any option to return to centrist government to preserve power (see Russia, Hungary etc.). The cumulative outcome of all of this is rather bleak. But median income will be a few percents higher, yahoo, amazing.
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.
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.
Not to mention that physical jobs in e.g. manufacturing have been highly automated by "the robots" for decades
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.
I don't think it measures much else.
Why do you think the SAT is a measure of hard work or 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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
> 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...
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.
You think you already can't "make a living" without working at a FAANG? Is this a serious post?
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.
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.
Says the man who is going to be the feudal lord in GP's scenario…
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'm picturing a 12th century French feudal lord saying these words to some of his serfs complaining from a lack of firewood.
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.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Qualityland-Marc-Uwe-Kling/dp/1538732...
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.)
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 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.
How much capital does one need to be in that group? Is that the same world wide, or location-dependent?
It was discussed here.
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.
1. Full-blown socialism
2. Georgism
Georgism may have been right all along!
3. Push back against AI, do not accept it as inevitable. Treat it like cigarettes or leaded fuel.
Our two options are socialism or barbarism.
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.
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.
Cute, but that's why they took over TikTok baby, so there's no chance of anything like that happening again.
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:
Okay! You first though. What, still here?
Without standardized tests, my transcript probably doesn't get me into a top school, I likely don't end up in tech, and honestly maybe I would've been forced to develop a work ethic earlier, which might have been better for me.
$62,970 per year is not $100K-$200K
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers...
Where are your statistics?
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.
In GGP's scenario, there isn't much room at the top. :)
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.
Whats the next 20000 years look like in your mind?
I agree that they’re not there yet but I don’t want to discredit the benefits of these recent advancements
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.
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.
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.
I'm doing my part!
Would you like to know more?
The novel is a bit of a dark comedy sci-fi. And even though many details are surprisingly accurate (for a story written a decade ago) robots buying crap produced by robots is IMO meant to illustrate an absurd racket to inflate demand.
It doesn't take a lot to recreate the capitalism to feudalism pipeline. If you have currency, small imbalances in resources and needs compound over time, creating imbalances in wealth. Imbalances in wealth provide the opportunity to leverage that imbalance for further wealth by way of rentseeking. Wealth provides power which provides more wealth and more power. Eventually your landlords drop the "land" prefix and simply become nobility.
Prior to the invention of currency, we had reputation economies. One might be tempted to model such economies as just money economies with implicit ledgers, but that isn't how reputation works in the real world. Being implicit, reputation captures a lot of activity that doesn't warrant an overt exchange of currency. Think of all the things that you appreciate, and make you value a relationship with someone more, that would be terribly inappropriate to pay them for: the friendly guy at the pub who tells you stories of questionable accuracy, a fellow parent watching your kid during a playdate, anything in the romantic sphere at all. Reputation also doesn't add up in anything close to a linear way: The guy who did something really big once and the guy who did something small with extreme regularly over a long period of time both likely have stronger ties with others in their community than the one who sporadically provided middling value. Reputation also isn't particularly inheritable: I might feel some obligation to someone's kid because of my relationship with their father, but that obligation fades rapidly as they entire adulthood, and nobody owes you shit for who your grandfather was. Likewise, gifts from someone who has an embarrassment of excess are valued much less than the same thing offered by someone who has barely enough.
All told, reputation economies act as a damping function on wealth and power accumulation, whereas currency economies provide positive feedback on the same.
And currency (given that we make it up and have a reasonable degree of control over its worth and distribution) does not have to be a static cumulative ledger
There are models of currency that try to include such dampening intrinsically (Tankies love talking about various experimental forms of currency as "labor vouchers" to try and sidestep the "moneyless" pitch of Communism), but I've yet to see one that really addresses the "wealth begets wealth, hierarchy begets hierarchy" problem.
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.
Trump's recent foray into Iran has indeed hit fuel/gas prices, the supply chain of some regional goods, and will have a knock-on impact on other goods subsequently due to rising fuel costs. The impact of tariffs on consumers is largely confined to the US.
Rent and healthcare are the 1A and 1B issues of our time.
As far as healthcare goes, the entire system is a mess. We already tried the Affordable Care Act to get more people covered, which only skyrocketed costs. The only way out is to increase the competition in the market, AKA supply side. Bernie Sanders is only familiar with demand-side solutions, which do not work. Sanders himself seems completely oblivious to the housing crisis in his own state of Vermont, which is being mitigated everywhere else through supply-side solutions.
I was mostly trying to make the point that the cost of living crisis is global, affecting many countries, and that your US-centric view doesn't scale. Healthcare costs hitting consumers directly isn't global as most countries have totally different systems.
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That said, your suggestion that the answer to rampant capitalism making healthcare unaffordable is more rampant capitalism (which you call competition) is... interesting.
And I wasn't advocating for Sanders personally or his policies specifically, just using him as an example of a conviction politician who might have had the chutzpah to take on and dismantle the business-lobbying-politics establishment.
> By my estimate, about 60% of Idahoans don't earn a livable wage
Sure boss it’s all fine and dandy.
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.
--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?
This is a scenario where the AI/capital owners complex has already survived the collapse of the consumer economy.
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.
What are you talking about? Is this some dramatic way of saying you think some of their products are underpriced relative to their specifications?
You think housing market are tough now, wait until you’re competing with 5 robot families who all have jobs you used to do.
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.
Will you define "frontier living" so I can better see the lack of space ?
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 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.
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.
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.
Even so for someone who's been crushed in the gears enough they might give it a try.
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!
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.
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the mind of man"?
And no, hand waving about "UBI" doesn't count unless they start actually doing the politics required to implement UBI.
But it’s just the same idiots were rabidly cheering the latest JavaScript framework a decade ago, NFT’s and all manors or ridiculous things anyone with 2 working brain cells saw transparently though.
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.
It is just plain not true statement that you need “FAANG money” to afford to live in Idaho.
If they're choosing not to have kids then they are doing their part towards their beliefs.
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)
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!
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.
In the US, our problems stem from a lack of "capitalism," or healthy markets, or whatever anyone wants to label it. Bottom line, it's very much a supply side problem.
In housing, for example, NIMBY laws have for decades restricted all kinds of new housing being built. In capitalism, developers would be allowed to build. So we've very much had the opposite of capitalism.
Cities that are waking up to this and allowing new houses to be built are seeing rents fall across the board.
I'd challenge whether for complex topics like healthcare, there truly ever could/would be a market that would deliver the savings you envisage.
When someone is diagnosed with cancer, you'd expect them to do everything in their power to give the best outcome, right? Wrong. Most people just go to their local hospital, and sadly the quality of physicians, surgeons, treatments offered, and overall care varies tremendously. There are various data to suggest that joining a clinical trial may offer improved outcomes (and of course, in extremis, clinical trial participation is the only way to access experimental treatments) and yet a very small percentage of patients ever do. Anecdotal experience suggests that many patients can barely understand the details of their disease and treatments (which are becoming more technical with time).
My point? For reasons that require further exploration, healthcare "customers" typically aren't sufficiently informed, discerning, engaged, or mobile in the way that would be necessary for a genuine competitive market composed of for-profit providers to function effectively to drive down prices and improve outcomes.
If I squint my eyes and imagine really hard, I can see living off the land, supported by small fusion reactors powering powerful AGI computer clusters, highly advanced 3D printers capable of producing all the physical support structure of life.
AGI + Power + Magic 3D printing and maybe one can live "off the land" with "civilization and all of human knowledge" hiding inside this portable tech stack.
And if they don't?...
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.
And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.
Apple is not giving away something for free; rather, they are losing possible future gains from immediately putting the cash to work.
If the debt is never called, yes, that is true. However, most companies don't get that luxury. For regular poor people, eventually those who control those companies need to call the debt to get the food, shelter, etc. they need to live and, when possible, things like entertainment, vacations, etc. to make life enjoyable. However, once you become rich, you transcend beyond that — where you cannot ever begin to call all the debt you've accumulated. It's a uniquely rich experience to be able to sit on billions of dollars worth of debt and not think twice about those who owe something.
> If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free
Exactly. In that scenario both the buyer and seller exchange an equal amount of value. No debt lingers to be paid (or never paid, as the case may be) in the future. But Apple wants more. They want you to promise them something else in some hypothetical future.
Not because they think you, average Joe who cannot think of anything to offer the world beyond simple labor, will actually ever come up with some magical thing they want to buy. But because they know that the idea of holding debt gives them social standing; prestige. They aren't taking your promise expecting something real in return — hence why the debt simply accumulates — they are taking your promise because having that promise on paper offers them value.
And in some robot/AI future where humans no longer can even offer labor as something of marginal value, holding debt will still offer social standing and prestige all the same. Therefore there is no reason why these companies wouldn't continue to sell products to humans for fictional future promises, just like they already are.
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.
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.
California is an especially egregious example because none of the inherited familial homes are taxed appropriately, which lowers liquidity and drives up market rates further. If you wanted to create a landed gentry, California Article XIII A is the gold standard for a policy to do that [1]
Of course, a lot of families never end up owning a home in an area that will experience that kind of appreciation. But the idea that it's "newcomers vs. life-long-residents" is wrong. It's actually more about the tension between the life-long-residents who own property and pursue NIMBYism vs. everyone else.
[1]: https://law.justia.com/constitution/california/article-xiii-...
Millions did the same. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/aca-enrollees-uninsured.html
Narrator: "In fact, they did not"
ACA plans and LG/SG plans are not the same, and pretending they are is, frankly, a large part of why healthcare in this country is such a dumb discussion - those discussing it have no idea what they're talking about.
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.
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.
If money is trickling down to you from FAANG, you're benefiting from their largesse - or, rather, being exploited by the control they have over your source of income, as both an individual and an business owner. FAANG throwing their weight around to force-underpay suppliers becomes the problem of the retail worker whose wages are paid by underpaid consumers. And so on.
> And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.
According to you, any transaction in which one party A proffers a non-currency resource, and the other, B, offers currency, is in fact the signing of a contract in which B promises to provide the other party something in the future. However, A could then turn around and promise party C for its resources using B's promise - and effectively transfer this promise to C, which then holds the right to demand resources from B.
You are effectively just describing the fiat system of currency where B is the government.
Calling cash, which is fungible and transferrable, "debt", which generally denotes an obligation of some sort, obfuscates what your logic.
Once you pay Apple - ergo, transfer it IOUs that represent your promise to provide resources in the future - it has no way of holding you to your promise other than by giving you back your IOU or giving it to someone else. This does not square with the definition of "debt".
Framing it in terms of debt simply confuses people. Of course a billionaire would not be able to "call all the debt [they have] accumulated". You're just saying that they maintain so much value that they can't ever trade it all for tangible goods and services. However, no-one except the government has to honour their request to trade their so-called "debt" that they have accumulated from others for actual resources.
Quite possibly. But that doesn't actually matter because if they don't understand something they will ask questions until they do understand, just as it seems you now do. That's how communication works. It is bidirectional for good reason. I admittedly don't understand what you are trying to add with this. What are we supposed to learn from this?
You can write paragraphs about how displacing people is fair, how kicking grannies out of their homes and auctioning them off because of tax debt (something that was happening) is the moral way. But you are still just talking around displacement of people to reach your desired end goal.
I'm not pro-displacement. I'm pro-housing, which we need much more of in SF.
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”
The US saw an average of $14,885 per-capita healthcare costs in 2024. Higher now.
The difference being that if you don’t need to use your HSA in a year you keep it - unlike low deductible plans.
I have never known a health care provider that you can’t negotiate a payment plan with. Even if your HSA isn’t funded, they could probably have a payment plan = HSA monthly contribution and then take it out of the HSA.
Yes I understand that a lot of people making $40K would be deftly afraid of doing that. But they would still statistically come out ahead
Perhaps some people are offended by this argument, but it's definitely worthy of a discussion instead of censorship.
> 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.
(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.)
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.
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.
I don’t think so, at least not in the us. Granted I was younger during those times .
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.
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".
Slopspeak detected.
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."
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.
The losses fueling these companies is staggering and will not last.
Well, everyone who can afford the $500/month ultra max pro plan to access unlimited ad free LLMs
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!
https://concludia.org/step/6f3cbaa2-65d4-3c44-8c1f-23f6ddf2b...
Reading the thread below, I'm always curious where in the argument the various counterpoints would attach. Like if a counterpoint is fatal or just an offshoot. I didn't have the system try and semantically analyze it for flaws/counterpoints yet, I just tried to get it to depict the article's reasoning. Not sure yet how good a job it did.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
In other words, the obligations of those without Capital is to write laws that demand the benefits of Capital be shared with all.
Oops! 16 years too late, at least here in the USA.
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.
This already happened
How do you propose they do that exactly?
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.
Is this written by AI?
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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..
Maybe that is itself a sign of the widening wealth disparity. Even smart, normally tepid, people fall into extremes when wealth is discussed.
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”.
Wealth and intelligence aren’t correlated at all. Wealth and education are quite strongly correlated but education isn’t intelligence.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.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.
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)
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
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.
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?
Re post agi world and coefficients: yupp totally agree. This isn't proper modelling. I just wanted something I can play around with to test my intuitions.
Re Jevons: ok let's say that latent demand is freed up. It's bounded by human purchasing power and the rate at which humans can actually consume the output.
Re programmer jobs, point taken, thanks for the clarification, I'll actually look this up properly. However there is other evidence suggesting that not all is well either https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...
Thanks again for reading!
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?
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.
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 ?
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 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
Average Joe’s life will be pretty awesome
Just give it some more time
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 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.
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.
For awhile now I've wished for a tool like this, except it would also incorporate previous discussions that match the same/similar node sentiments in order to encourage group dialogue that builds on previous discussions instead of mindlessly re-hashing them ad nauseam like you see on most platforms these days.
Also, breaking points down into discrete pieces like you've done is reminiscent of the pol.is platform that vTaiwan leveraged, except theirs was pre-AI with whatever limitations that would have brought.
I know a 5'3" guy who played in the NBA.
Donors, lobbyists, and ring kissers driving what’s instituted.
In fact, to address an earlier comment:
> Not because they think you, average Joe who cannot think of anything to offer the world beyond simple labor, will actually ever come up with some magical thing they want to buy. But because they know that the idea of holding debt gives them social standing; prestige. They aren't taking your promise expecting something real in return — hence why the debt simply accumulates — they are taking your promise because having that promise on paper offers them value.
> And in some robot/AI future where humans no longer can even offer labor as something of marginal value, holding debt will still offer social standing and prestige all the same. Therefore there is no reason why these companies wouldn't continue to sell products to humans for fictional future promises, just like they already are.
The cash Average Joe proffers for a product - what you describe as "debt" - wouldn't be in Joe's possession without first being exchanged for Average Joe's simple labour. Simply put - Average Joe cannot be indebted to Apple without first trading his labour for someone else's indebtedness, which he then gives to Apple in return for his iPhone. If his labour has no value, he has no unit by which to even denominate any potential indebtedness he may offer.
2. At least where democracy is found, the government and the customers are the exact same people. The distinction you are trying to draw isn't clear either. What do you think government is if not people?
In our case, we tend to hit the max out-of-pocket pretty fast.
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.
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.
Going by the house shouldn’t be more than 3.5x your income. That puts the necessary income less than $50K.
Heck I had my second house built in the northern burbs of Atlanta in “the good school system” for $335k in 2016. We sold it in 2024 for exactly twice the price.
Furthermore, there are many studies showing that more wealth inequality results in more consumption in a society. Which is not good for many reasons.
2. I disagree. An autocratic government is fully capable of issuing fiat currency, and a the government being obliged to provide resources in return for its currency is a concept orthogonal to democracy. It doesn't matter whose "debt" cash stems from. All that matters is that it can be traded easily.
Also, I updated my comment to point out more clearly where I disagree with your conclusions. (Apologies for such a late response. I hit HN's rate limit.)
2019: 83260
2024: 83730
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.
Likely not for many, but I definitely did all this math annually.
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.
As for the real, does it measure housing, insurance and medical as well? Does it measure the safety on the streets? Overall quality of life?
AI will strip what's left of the middle class to bare bones. And the tech lords will call it 'disruption', the fixated adolescents they are.
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...
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...
That page breaks about a second after loading. It's enough time to see the graphic, but not enough to see the methodology for data collection. Can you share how that data is collected? Afaik government sources do not track real income distribution.
And this isn't even considering the productivity growth over time having a widely asymmetrical distribution, ie not captured by the median person.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-american-income-vs-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unless you mean globally, in which case it's near impossible to tell. 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.
"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]
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.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0103M (26%)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0104M (23%)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0105M (22%)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0106M (17%)
Yes, the bottom quintile has a lot more variance, but the argument that the poor are being left behind has been really hard to make for the last 5 years. Coupled with high inflation, which erodes the savings of the rich, they're actually getting a bigger slice of the overall pie.
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,
What are you talking about man, we don't even provide for everyone right now even though we actually could
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.
I'm not saying this is a likely scenario. But as far as I can tell, we will objectively be mostly at their mercy. And how merciful have they been over the last few decades?
Alrighty.
Without radical change of the current system any technological advancement will only make the rich richer.