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The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

danielhomola.com

111–120 of 435 posts

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We fixed it before and we can fix it again. We need another Roosevelt.

I wouldn't rely on a single human being to fix this kind of issue. It's only solvable through massive collaboration and communication among those who want to fix it.

...which is typically done by building a movement around a leader who represents the values a movement wants to achieve.

FDR is a good example of an American leader who made substantive, wildly successful, left-leaning policy changes that ushered in decades of prosperity and (in part) last to this very day despite facing heavy opposition from the business elite of the time. They even tried to coup him!

At the time, the long term trends were dire for the American left. Double insulation was strong and getting stronger. Then the Great Depression hit. Around the world, populists and radicals were elected to office, and one way or another they changed things. In America, we managed our reform process without trying to conquer the world and without starving millions. Not Hitler, not Stalin. Roosevelt. I think that's a worthy goal to aim for again this time around.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#112
post #30

Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it. AI is currently a commodity. Maybe one of the labs will be able to differentiate sufficiently to be able to charge the kinds of premiums they need just to pay back their investors. Maybe, instead, we'll see something akin to the FOSS revolution, where large, high-quality, open training sets are developed to make sure there's always a fair…

If you denominate your income in silly money such as USD, then it won't go down, probably will go up! However if you start asking questions on how much housing medical and materials it buys, then I think it will squeeze people even more than now.

That's what the "real" in "median real income" means. It measures how much stuff you can buy, not how much currency you have. And it's been going up relatively reliably: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#113
post #30

Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it. AI is currently a commodity. Maybe one of the labs will be able to differentiate sufficiently to be able to charge the kinds of premiums they need just to pay back their investors. Maybe, instead, we'll see something akin to the FOSS revolution, where large, high-quality, open training sets are developed to make sure there's always a fair…

> Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it.

Assuming you're intending "real" to mean the technical definition of "real" which is "adjusted for inflation", its basically been flat since 2019*, and that's using the government's inflation measures which abuse things like basket substitution and other hacks to hide the actual increases in the true cost of living. If you made better assumptions about inflation, you actually would see that median real income is down dramatically already over the past several decades.

Here is a recent video on some of these measurement biases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B4tgG-CGXU&t=1s

Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#114
>Large language models already match median professional performance on the routine tasks that constitute a large fraction of professional billing across legal research, financial analysis, software engineering,

Another article that vomits 1 billion words assuming that agi had been achieved. If you have the audacity to question this claim, what value will be left from this pile of words?

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#115

No way to approach this other than gross simplification, but we have seen generally that as technology improves, standard of living goes up. Autonomous machines breaking that trend, maybe, the only argument I find persuasive is that it makes the centralisation of power easier.

Do you think people are happier now than they were in the 80s/90s/00s?

I don’t think so, at least not in the us. Granted I was younger during those times .

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#116
post #16

The future (if we keep using money to allocate resources) is something akin to feudalism but worse. If you are born at the bottom you will never rise to the top. It's bleak. Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities. There will be a few well off people with capital. The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones. Everyone else will essentially live in a parallel econom…

The permanent underclass permeates everything.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#117
post #69
post #16

The future (if we keep using money to allocate resources) is something akin to feudalism but worse. If you are born at the bottom you will never rise to the top. It's bleak. Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities. There will be a few well off people with capital. The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones. Everyone else will essentially live in a parallel econom…

We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous. > Collectively, the wealthiest 1% held about $55 trillion in assets in the third quarter of 2025 — roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans combined. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-d...

> We’re already there. Your individual labor isn’t enough to make a living unless you subscribe to the altar of a feudal FAANG. This is preposterous.

You think you already can't "make a living" without working at a FAANG? Is this a serious post?

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#118

>Most of the traits you were born with - intelligence, conscientiousness, height, bone density, grip strength, resting heart rate - follow a bell curve. Is this written by AI?

Why? The dashes?

The shear volume of writing, the false rigor and vestigial artifacts (preface, interactive charts, MORE filler hidden behind accordion dropdowns) are a tell. I would be more annoyed but I'm fascinated by this kind of false productivity that AI is encouraging.

I don't agree with the conclusion anyway, as AI is CURRENTLY providing wealth to me with side projects that wouldn't have been possible to take on 2 years ago.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#120

A rebuttal: the institutional and experiential barriers to wealth generation can be overcome with AI unlike any other technology before. Consider: someone wanting to start a business previously had to negotiate tremendous legal/compliance/technological hurdles. The prospect of going alone given these is very intimidating so most without wealth or connections didn't. Their good ideas languished. Now, everyone has a kn…

Let's see how true this is once the era of VC-subsidized AI ends. A 10x increase in frontier model cost is an entirely reasonable outcome given that Claude code is rumored to allocate up to $5K in compute for a $200/mo plan.

The losses fueling these companies is staggering and will not last.

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