In other words, the obligations of those without Capital is to write laws that demand the benefits of Capital be shared with all.
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.
Donors, lobbyists, and ring kissers driving what’s instituted.
This already happened
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.
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.
Is this written by AI?
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.
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.
I agree that they’re not there yet but I don’t want to discredit the benefits of these recent advancements
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Qualityland-Marc-Uwe-Kling/dp/1538732...
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.
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.
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.
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the mind of man"?
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!
> 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...
You think you already can't "make a living" without working at a FAANG? Is this a serious post?
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:
Whats the next 20000 years look like in your mind?
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.
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.
Says the man who is going to be the feudal lord in GP's scenario…
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.
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”.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
What are you talking about man, we don't even provide for everyone right now even though we actually could
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.
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.
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.
$62,970 per year is not $100K-$200K
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
2019: 83260
2024: 83730
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
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.
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 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..
Well, everyone who can afford the $500/month ultra max pro plan to access unlimited ad free LLMs
The losses fueling these companies is staggering and will not last.
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.
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 don’t think so, at least not in the us. Granted I was younger during those times .
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?
> 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.
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.
dankai•1h ago
Perhaps some people are offended by this argument, but it's definitely worthy of a discussion instead of censorship.
suddenlybananas•47m ago
advael•35m ago
bspammer•34m ago
> 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.
applfanboysbgon•19m ago
(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.)
snikeris•5m ago