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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

#231

Post by matthest »

bix6 wrote: post #69
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…

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...

The cost of living crisis is almost singularly caused by poor governance, not feudal tech lords.

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.

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

#232

Post by vrganj »

adverbly wrote: post #65
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…

Seems like if we want to avoid dystopia, our options are: 1. Full-blown socialism 2. Georgism Georgism may have been right all along!

Rosa Luxemburg was right all along.

Our two options are socialism or barbarism.

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

#233

Post by TGower »

throw4847285 wrote: post #191
TGower wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now it is difficult for the average person to put themselves in the shoes of a homeless person. There are a litany of ready made excuses not to do so: "Oh it's the drugs", "They aren't even going to the shelter", "They must have mental illness", a variety of ways to say "I could never end up like that, if it was me I'd do better and pull myself out". These excuses evaporate in the face of a real automation wave…

This already happened. When deindustrialization first hit in the US it devastated the black community. The result? A litany of pundits decrying Black criminality, bad family structures, cultural pathologies. It's no coincidence that The Bell Curve came out around then. A decade or two later, all of sudden the same phenomena are happening in working class white communities. Drug addiction, family dissolution, abject p…

With those past examples the majority of people thought "It's not my problem, I won't be affected", and they were mostly right. With an automation wave of the scale needed to get to effectively no jobs, that's just not the case. They will see that it is indeed coming for them, their friends, and family. They will act accordingly. Altruism not required, just self interest.

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

#234

Post by deaux »

BobbyJo wrote: post #218

HN's users are probably the most measured and considerate on the internet, and even here it is difficult to talk about things like this with any degree of nuance. Maybe that is itself a sign of the widening wealth disparity. Even smart, normally tepid, people fall into extremes when wealth is discussed.

When the wealth disparity is extreme, discussing it in an extreme manner is not extreme, it's normal. Just like how in 1943, an allied conversation on how to massacre Axis troops as quickly and efficiently as possible, would in no way have been extreme.

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

#235

Post by cheesecompiler »

zozbot234 wrote: post #188
kjkjadksj wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at home prices and then tell me it sucked.

What home prices? There are many places (second-rate cities or rural) where home prices are just fine. Not everyone has to live in SF.

Housing prices are not binary: they have skyrocket in every major city and city-adjacent suburb. The middle class has consistently declined since the 70s.

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

#236

Post by keiferski »

A thing I've noticed with AI-written articles (like this one) is that they have a difficult time articulating their actual point. They seem to be trained on what I'll call "Gish Gallop [1] bloggers", where the intent is just to overwhelm the reader with data and arguments, so many that replying to them all in a comment would take hours. This style is especially popular amongst the chattering-about-AI-classes, hence its popularity in AI discussions.

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

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

#237

Post by willis936 »

bloppe wrote: post #112
trolleski wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Median is obviously flawed here. What should be looked at is wealth distribution.

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...

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

#238

Post by AndrewKemendo »

automatic6131 wrote: post #183
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

>The idealized future in my option has something like 1/1000th of the current population Okay! You first though. What, still here?

I’ve tried to kill myself a lot of times but people seem to want me to stay around so unfortunately I am stuck here with everybody else.

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

#239

Post by smallmancontrov »

skyberrys wrote: post #187
smallmancontrov wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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, t…

Perhaps I mean to ask a question then, how did FDR manage to become such a widely heard leader back then with so many less ways for people to talk together? Did it make a bigger difference that he had to exist as someone people spoke to other people about? Shouldn't it be easier to find these leaders with so much more access to everyone nowadays?

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.

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

#240

Post by deaux »

zozbot234 wrote: post #142
pylua wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was very much there during the 1990s, people were median happier than in 2026.

Unless you mean globally, in which case it's near impossible to tell. But GP likely meant the US or Europe.

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