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.
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,
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.
Communication friction is only one cost of running a campaign among many, so the structure of parties and campaigns and primary / general elections has largely remained the same. Even if the technological barriers went away, I suspect the human factors would still hold up the structure because only so many people are willing to spend years of their life building legitimacy and promoting a political platform and each voter is only willing to spend a certain amount of time participating and choosing.
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.
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 agree that they’re not there yet but I don’t want to discredit the benefits of these recent advancements
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.
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.
This is a scenario where the AI/capital owners complex has already survived the collapse of the consumer economy.
[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.
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.
Cute, but that's why they took over TikTok baby, so there's no chance of anything like that happening again.
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!
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 housing, a factory, farm it, etc.) Poor people can only afford to hoard it. Land costs are never the hurdle if you have a viable business strategy to go along with it. Land is only unaffordable today if you don't plan to use it effectively — which is, again, exactly what Georgism tires to put a stop to.
Our two options are socialism or barbarism.
> 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?
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.
Millions did the same. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/aca-enrollees-uninsured.html
Narrator: "In fact, they did not"
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.
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.
Even so for someone who's been crushed in the gears enough they might give it a try.
Will you define "frontier living" so I can better see the lack of space ?
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.
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?
Okay! You first though. What, still here?
If they're choosing not to have kids then they are doing their part towards their beliefs.
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.
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.
Says the man who is going to be the feudal lord in GP's scenario…
In GGP's scenario, there isn't much room at the top. :)
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.
And no, hand waving about "UBI" doesn't count unless they start actually doing the politics required to implement UBI.
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.
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.
It was discussed here.
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.)
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
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.
Alrighty.
Robotic helpers to do what ? More free time ?
We, as a society, can already have more free time, we just have to choose to work less. We already have it all : enough food and housing for everybody, 80+ years of life expectancy ... What will we achieve with robotic helpers or whatever new goods and services ?
This is a perfect example of something that can benefit greatly from abundant goods and services. Driving the cost of solar panel manufacturing, supply chain included, and deployment. Enabling continuous monitoring and fast response to GHG leaks or forest fire starting. Reforesting efforts. There are so many ways in which the application of intelligence and labor can help us here, and AI can vastly grow the supply of intelligence and labor.
> More free time?
Yes! Time we can reclaim from the mundane chores of life to do with as we choose! How could you not want that?
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...
Where are your statistics?
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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..
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?
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 .
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.
Unless you mean globally, in which case it's near impossible to tell. But GP likely meant the US or Europe.
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.
Intelligence is considered genetic now? That's quite a bold claim.
Slopspeak detected.
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.
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.
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!
Maybe that is itself a sign of the widening wealth disparity. Even smart, normally tepid, people fall into extremes when wealth is discussed.
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.
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.
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.
dankai•2h ago
Perhaps some people are offended by this argument, but it's definitely worthy of a discussion instead of censorship.
suddenlybananas•1h ago
advael•1h ago
bspammer•1h 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•1h 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•56m ago
applfanboysbgon•41m ago
kjkjadksj•35m ago
applfanboysbgon•30m ago