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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

#361

Post by OkayPhysicist »

giacomoforte wrote: post #41
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…

There won't be any well off people because the machines will rule. Humanity will become second to its own creation. 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.

I'd propose that the opposite is just as plausible. Look at the world today: compared to most of the people in charge, plenty in the underclass are superintelligent. Yet the rich remain that way, because the underclass are taught to play by the rules that were written by the rich. Who's to say the same scheme can't be pulled off against the machines?

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

#362

Post by deepspace »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #252
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...

Please. The median household income in the US is around $85K https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/ The median individual household is $55K https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ Neither are living on the streets.

You illustrate the point perfectly. "Not living on the streets" is not exactly a measure of prosperity. With $55K, you cannot afford a decent place to live, a health event can and will bankrupt you, and retirement is out of the question.

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

#363

Post by tasuki »

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…

> There will be a few well off people with capital.

How much capital does one need to be in that group? Is that the same world wide, or location-dependent?

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

#364

Post by 9rx »

dag100 wrote: post #360
9rx wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am, of course, referring to the IOUs (a.k.a. cash) they famously are sitting on, and have been sitting on for decades. Technically they can call the debt at any time, but what does average Joe have to give that Apple would want? If there was something appealing they'd have done it already. In reality there is nothing and it will sit there forevermore and the consumers on the other side of the transaction ultimately…

By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free". If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free (as there would be no debt to receive or credit to provide). And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair tr…

> By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free".

If the debt is never called, yes, that is true. However, most companies don't get that luxury. For regular poor people, eventually those who control those companies need to call the debt to get the food, shelter, etc. they need to live and, when possible, things like entertainment, vacations, etc. to make life enjoyable. However, once you become rich, you transcend beyond that — where you cannot ever begin to call all the debt you've accumulated. It's a uniquely rich experience to be able to sit on billions of dollars worth of debt and not think twice about those who owe something.

> If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free

Exactly. In that scenario both the buyer and seller exchange an equal amount of value. No debt lingers to be paid (or never paid, as the case may be) in the future. But Apple wants more. They want you to promise them something else in some hypothetical future.

Not because they think you, average Joe who cannot think of anything to offer the world beyond simple labor, will actually ever come up with some magical thing they want to buy. But because they know that the idea of holding debt gives them social standing; prestige. They aren't taking your promise expecting something real in return — hence why the debt simply accumulates — they are taking your promise because having that promise on paper offers them value.

And in some robot/AI future where humans no longer can even offer labor as something of marginal value, holding debt will still offer social standing and prestige all the same. Therefore there is no reason why these companies wouldn't continue to sell products to humans for fictional future promises, just like they already are.

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

#365

Post by triceratops »

trillic wrote: post #56
triceratops wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think a high SAT score doesn't need "hard work and character"?

The SAT is a measure of test-taking ability, socioeconomic status, a narrow band of academic skills, and processing information under time pressure. I don't think it measures much else. Why do you think the SAT is a measure of hard work or character?

You think test-taking and information processing ability comes without hard work?

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

#366

Post by tasuki »

anal_reactor wrote: post #281
deaux wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But GP likely meant the US or Europe. Reminds me of movies "Aliens attack Earth. By Earth by obviously mean USA. By USA we obviously mean New York City. By New York City we obviously mean Manhattan.". Half of Europe was literally undergoing complete economic collapse in 90's.

Which half?

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

#367

Post by bloppe »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #321
bloppe wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a lot of people on HN, "making a living" means owning property in a VHCOL area.

For a lot of people on HN, they grew up in VHCOL places that used to be affordable and are trying to keep the lives they've had since birth. I was forced to move, lost connection to my friends and half my family, all the places I knew and had memories/attachment to, habits/hobbies. I understand why they are fighting to keep their lives and not give up and in a way die and start a new, lonelier, much different life. I…

I agree with all of that, but it's not representative of everybody that grew up in the VHCOL area. A slight majority of residents in the Bay Area (used as an example) own their own home. If you grew up there, and your parents owned their own home, your family has benefited enormously from the meteoric rise in house prices. Those people (long-time residents) are thrilled by the influx of tech cash and actively pursue NIMBY policies to restrict the housing supply to keep prices as high as possible. Most of the tech workers actually moving to the Bay Area and renting would much prefer a massive increase in the housing supply to bring prices down.

California is an especially egregious example because none of the inherited familial homes are taxed appropriately, which lowers liquidity and drives up market rates further. If you wanted to create a landed gentry, California Article XIII A is the gold standard for a policy to do that [1]

Of course, a lot of families never end up owning a home in an area that will experience that kind of appreciation. But the idea that it's "newcomers vs. life-long-residents" is wrong. It's actually more about the tension between the life-long-residents who own property and pursue NIMBYism vs. everyone else.

[1]: https://law.justia.com/constitution/california/article-xiii-...

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

#368

Post by dag100 »

repelsteeltje wrote: post #107
rmah wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the vast majority live at a "borderline biblical" standard of living, then there is simply not enough excess wealth to pay for the data centers (or more accurately, the industrial output necessary to build and maintain those data centers) you're talking about. Agrarian societies (i.e. borderline biblical), by definition, do not have the excess labor necessary for industrial output at any scale (here I mean anythin…

In Marc-Uwe Kling's Quality Land novel [1], the absence of purchasing power resulting from AIs having taken over, is mitigated by shopping robots buying random useless stuff. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Qualityland-Marc-Uwe-Kling/dp/1538732...

I feel like this makes very little sense, because a purchase is a trade - one resource (currency) for another (the product/service). If the product has no value, there is no reason to engage in the trade. This can only exist for the purpose of wealth transfer from the operator of the shopping robot to the seller of the useless products, or as a facade of some sort.

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

#369

Post by bix6 »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #357
bix6 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think regular Americans have the money to afford high deductible plans? One ER visit bankrupts people.

High deductible plans max out at around $10K deductible. But it’s the same cost in my experience low deductible vs high deductible + HSA contribution. The difference being that if you don’t need to use your HSA in a year you keep it - unlike low deductible plans.

Ah yes because the family making $40k/year can afford $10k in medical expenses.

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

#370

Post by bloppe »

willis936 wrote: post #354
bloppe wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, median is exactly what you want. It strips out outliers. It's the "middle of the pack" person. Mean is the one that would be skewed by outliers. And "the poor are getting poorer" is simply untrue for the last 10 years. They had a pretty bad time from 1980 - 2015, but in the last 10 years, their real income has risen faster than any other quintile: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/growth-in-real-wages-over-t…

Median says very little about distribution and says almost nothing about how the tails are doing (which are real people that are easily ignored). That page breaks about a second after loading. It's enough time to see the graphic, but not enough to see the methodology for data collection. Can you share how that data is collected? Afaik government sources do not track real income distribution.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0102M (47% increase since 2021)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0103M (26%)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0104M (23%)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0105M (22%)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0106M (17%)

Yes, the bottom quintile has a lot more variance, but the argument that the poor are being left behind has been really hard to make for the last 5 years. Coupled with high inflation, which erodes the savings of the rich, they're actually getting a bigger slice of the overall pie.

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