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The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

danielhomola.com

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

#141

Post by lukev »

poorman wrote: post #110
cglan wrote: 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…

I am going to say this for all the people thinking like this. This attitude will get you nowhere in life. It historically never has and in the future it never will.

That's right -- the best way to succeed within a system is to hustle as hard as you can, and definitely don't stop to question the system itself.

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

#142

Post by zozbot234 »

pylua wrote: post #115
alansaber wrote: post #80

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

Do you think people are happier now than they were in the 80s/90s/00s? I don’t think so, at least not in the us. Granted I was younger during those times .

Yes, dramatically so. The 1980s and 1990s sucked, we live in the future.

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

#143

Post by rib3ye »

cglan wrote: 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…

I saw a gh for a $100 stringer missile last week. I often wonder if I will miss the stable tyranny of American capitalism if we descend back into warring nation states defended by cheap autonomous munitions.

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

#144

Post by threetonesun »

tylershuster wrote: post #90
0x4e wrote: post #20

This is when I ask sincerely: how does AI truly benefit the average Joe? Sure it can help you do things “faster” and it can give you “private/cheaper” advice. But, AI feels increasingly like a thing that will make the powerful a lot more powerful with their data centres and automation shenanigans. All the hype feels like it’s being injected into everyone’s brain like a virus. Oh look at this shiny new tool! But, how…

I'm building an addition to my house and I use AI to visualize parts of it, which helps me plan efficiently, and I use it to answer questions about skills that I only have a little bit of experience in. I'm saving a ton of money and developing skills, so I count that as benefiting "the average Joe." I admit that I'm a programmer, but I'm using this as an example because it's helping me in an area in which I have litt…

People used to do this with books. Multiple generations of people before me built their own houses, when they had a question they'd just ask another human who had actual experience.

I'm not denying that AI makes searching for some of this easier, or might help you figure out what the right questions to ask are, but I often feel like it's a mostly crappy solution to the fact that we scaled data to infinity and refused to pay for any level of curation.

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

#145

Post by estimator7292 »

jmye wrote: post #117
bix6 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. That tends to happen when you don't increase the minimum wage for multiple decades.

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

rdiddly wrote: post #52

Commenting strictly on the metaphor in the title: Did you mean to say ladder? Bridges don't get pulled up. Edit to say: Yes I did think of drawbridges. And Batman is a scientist. But drawbridges are simply "opened" or "raised," and the implication always is that it's temporary and they will soon be "closed" or "lowered." Though they can be sabotaged in the open position. All right fine, OP please change your title to…

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by adverbly »

bloppe wrote: post #140
adverbly wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 as…

Your assertion that it's "flat" is rather unconvincing after looking at that graph. It's clearly been rising relatively consistently. The dip for covid I think is especially understandable, and it's currently higher than it's ever been. Maybe your personal expenses are not reflected by the CPI, but you can see for yourself: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2025.htm 44% housing, 8% medicine, 14% food…

Are you blind?

2019: 83260

2024: 83730

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

#148

Post by advael »

It's possible that this is true generally, but it disproportionately affects legal, peaceful paths to power. Knowledge work is definitely not the only means to secure wealth or power through intelligence, but crucially, it is the one that currently hits the sweet spot of plausibly securing wealth and sanctioned and legal in a peaceful society. It's possible "AI" or some other technology that's been invented recently or is currently being invented closes all paths to shifts in power, but if the hype about replacing knowledge workers is to be believed, it will certainly closes the peaceful paths considerably faster, and this seems pretty bad for everyone

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

#149

Post by bluefirebrand »

TGower wrote: post #106
bluefirebrand wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheaper prices don't matter at all when no one has any income due to all of the jobs being automated

This is true. It's by no means garunteed that we will get to a point where effectively all the jobs are being automated. If we eventually get there, it seems likely the path will be gradual and prosperous enough that we can handle the transition in a way that provides for everyone. The dangers of the alternative route are real, but hopefully obvious enough that we can collectively avoid them.

> it seems likely the path will be gradual and prosperous enough that we can handle the transition in a way that provides for everyone

What are you talking about man, we don't even provide for everyone right now even though we actually could

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

#150

Post by AndrewKemendo »

GolfPopper wrote: post #129
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idealized future in my option has something like 1/1000th of the current population It’s thermodynamically impossible for 8-10Billon animals that have no satiation reflex and limited coordination capacity to live on a resource limited rock Absolute Best case future is what I wrote in 2025 which is basically humans living in care facilities managed by machines: https://kemendo.com/We%20All%20Slept%20Well.pdf

Hey, I saw that movie! The little robots were cute.

Which?! I’d love to see a version of my short story of someone already did it
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