The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

https://danielhomola.com/m%20&%20e/ai/your-bridge-to-wealth-is-being-pulled-up/

by dankai • 4 months ago

269 408 4 months ago

dankai• 4 months ago

I resubmitted this because somebody flagged the original submission for unclear reasons and it had quite a lot of upvotes in a short time.

Perhaps some people are offended by this argument, but it's definitely worthy of a discussion instead of censorship.

suddenlybananas• 4 months ago

Well, all of the comments on the old submissions were complaining about the essay being AI slop. I haven't read the essay so I couldn't say, but that's clearly the reason why.

waffletower4• 4 months ago

That's clearly the "stated" reason why.

DustinKlent6• 4 months ago

I read the whole thing; it's definitely not AI slop. A few sentences taken out of an hour long read that are commonly used by AI doesn't mean the article was composed by AI. You'll find similar artifacts in any longer published work, including those published prior to AI.

advael2• 4 months ago

The essay, if taken seriously, has a logical conclusion that I'm sure a decent number on this website find uncomfortable, but perhaps more importantly, which at least some people who might have disproportionate power to make such decisions prefer not be discussed too heavily. This is a microcosm of the larger phenomenon

bspammer• 4 months ago

It's because it's AI written with all the usual over-the-top grandeur and a ridiculous number of negative parallelisms.

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.

MattGrommes• 4 months ago

This isn't really on you but the problem I have with comments like this is that I think most people write poorly so I can't tell if those are LLM artifacts or LinkedIn-speak artifacts. I need better heuristics for these things.

applfanboysbgon3• 4 months ago

It was flagged for being clearly botted, and I don't just mean LLM-generated (although it is also that). When I posted on and flagged the old submission, I noted that it had over two dozen upvotes in 15 minutes, despite the essay having a helpful "54 min read" indicator at the top. I truly do not believe the upvotes on these submissions are organic, and it really destroys my faith in HN that this was restored when the first one went down successfully.

(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• 4 months ago

You don't have to read the whole thing to upvote it.

kjkjadksj6• 4 months ago

I upvoted this without reading. For me sometimes the article is just the spark for a far more interesting set of comments that overshadow it. And it is really that I am voting for.

waffletower4• 4 months ago

While there are more excessive examples of moderation than Hacker News, "Rate Your Music" moderation is hilariously indulgent and arbitrary from my 2nd hand vantage, but moderation here and elsewhere tends to error on the side of removal and exercise of power. There is no BDSM thrill behind staying one's moderation ability. Many are attracted to moderation just as many police are attracted to their work to get the dopamine that is gifted to them by dominating others. But it might be reductive to think this moderation is tied to an individual's brain treat, and it might instead be useful to consider the host organization -- they may not feel enriched by posts that critique status quo capitalism.

SilverElfin• 4 months ago

Yep it is definitely being pulled up. The economy feels more winner takes all than ever. After this transition how can anyone without existing capital and moats compete?

stego-tech• 4 months ago

The piece gets into that in extensive detail that you should totally go read, but the long and short of it is that even those without capital and moats still have the power of writing law, and we need to exercise that early and often to redistribute capital before its concentration leads to legislative capture.

In other words, the obligations of those without Capital is to write laws that demand the benefits of Capital be shared with all.

hackyhacky• 4 months ago

even those without capital and moats still have the power of writing law,

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.

achierius• 4 months ago

before its concentration leads to legislative capture

This already happened

georgemcbay• 4 months ago

before its concentration leads to legislative capture.

Oops! 16 years too late, at least here in the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

jMyles• 4 months ago

those without capital and moats still have the power of writing law

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.

glitchc2• 4 months ago

Counterpoint: Lobbies, fund-raising and SuperPACs. Those without capital lack the influence that those with capital possess with lawmakers.

rmah2• 4 months ago

Sounds like a good way to ensure less capital in total.

DustinKlent6• 4 months ago

"the obligations of those without Capital is to write laws that demand the benefits of Capital be shared with all."

How do you propose they do that exactly?

newyankee• 4 months ago

the key part is 'more than ever', earlier the first world was happy with the status quo in general

croes• 4 months ago

It is already pulled up before, AI just pulls faster

lagniappe• 4 months ago

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?

profunctor• 4 months ago

Why? The dashes?

thrtythreeforty• 4 months ago

There are lots of subtle LLM-ism sentence structures that you can perceive, sort of subconsciously. Spend any amount of time with Claude and you'll unconsciously start to copy them.

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.

sp1nningaway2• 4 months ago

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.

pegasus• 4 months ago

Probably some AI assistance was involved. Though you'd expect em dashes above, for example. A better example would be "No regression. No noise. Just compounding." It's not so much as to bother me, and I'm often annoyed by the ever-expanding tide of slop.

0xDEFACED• 4 months ago

No regression. No noise. Just compounding.

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)

therealdeal2020• 4 months ago

oh gee doomsday is coming yeah yeah

cglan• 4 months ago

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 economy that is borderline biblical. Countries like this already exist in the form of countries with excess access to a single natural resource. See the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

rmah2• 4 months ago

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 anything more than a few % of contemporary levels).

energy123• 4 months ago

Robots will eventually be better than people at manual labor. I don't claim to know when that crossover will happen.

sdenton4• 4 months ago

What are ai and robots other than excess labor, waiting to be allocated? Why does the wealth have to come from the meat bags?

repelsteeltje3• 4 months ago

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...

acessoproibido2• 4 months ago

So you are saying essentially nothing changes ?

giacomoforte• 4 months ago

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.

thrance2• 4 months ago

Honestly, I'd rather be ruled by my laptop than the Epstein class.

OkayPhysicist3• 4 months ago

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?

paganel3• 4 months ago

The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones.

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.

jen203• 4 months ago

Do you have any sources for "normal" people (i.e. not the terminally online) being happy that datacenters were bombed?

deaux6• 4 months ago

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.

Cute, but that's why they took over TikTok baby, so there's no chance of anything like that happening again.

adverbly4• 4 months ago

Seems like if we want to avoid dystopia, our options are:

1. Full-blown socialism

2. Georgism

Georgism may have been right all along!

5aq9238• 4 months ago

Given that rich people often push Georgism, it looks like a trojan horse. Only rich people will be able to afford land.

3. Push back against AI, do not accept it as inevitable. Treat it like cigarettes or leaded fuel.

3842056935870• 4 months ago

Full-blown socialism is pretty dystopian.

vrganj• 4 months ago

Rosa Luxemburg was right all along.

Our two options are socialism or barbarism.

bix65• 4 months ago

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...

jmye3• 4 months ago

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?

matthest3• 4 months ago

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.

raw_anon_111114• 4 months ago

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.

ericmcer• 4 months ago

What do they mean by "assets"? Is it securities in the form of stocks/bonds/etc?

If so they own a bunch of bits on a server somewhere that technically represent an amount of goods/services they could never use in 10,000 lifetimes.

If Elon had 10 billion eggs in a warehouse it would be real easy to fix the price of eggs. We could also reduce healthcare costs by making Bezos & Zuck stop going to the doctor 4,000,000 times a day.

The reason peoples labor isn't granting them the goods and services they want is way more complex than just: "the billionaires are taking them all". You could kill every billionaire tomorrow and distribute all their wealth and it would only make shit cost more.

CalRobert7• 4 months ago

The parallel economy could even kinda sorta work except that we made frontier living largely illegal in many places (though I understand you probably could get some cheap land in e.g. Idaho and try to live off it) and the existence of said parallel society represents a clear challenge to capital owners who say trading your labour for their profit is the most sensible way to live.

pibaker4• 4 months ago

There is not enough space for 8 billion humans to do "frontier living."

AndrewKemendo6• 4 months ago

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

AtlasBarfed2• 4 months ago

That is a strange ideal, and I am an environmental nutso myself.

GolfPopper2• 4 months ago

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

automatic61313• 4 months ago

The idealized future in my option has something like 1/1000th of the current population

Okay! You first though. What, still here?

AtlasBarfed2• 4 months ago

End state of capitalism is Egyptian pharaohs, a few pyramid architects, and a lot of slaves and whips.

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.

poorman• 4 months ago

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.

pjerem2• 4 months ago

I am going to say this for all the people thinking like this : lol

danesparza• 4 months ago

Hmmm ... there is definitely historical precedence for the article's assertions.

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.

pibaker4• 4 months ago

When Nick is not at a computer, you can find him out racing sailboats and involved with various entrepreneurial ventures.

Says the man who is going to be the feudal lord in GP's scenario…

lukev• 4 months ago

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.

Faaak• 4 months ago

You can use AI because you know its good for you, but still think it won't make all people better off

rTX5CMRXIfFG• 4 months ago

Historical data is never a guarantee of future performance. The downside of your attitude is that you can’t really point at the right thing to do, so then you invest your time and effort on the same things, when it could be the case that the rules of the game have changed.

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.

thrance2• 4 months ago

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.

I'm picturing a 12th century French feudal lord saying these words to some of his serfs complaining from a lack of firewood.

carabiner• 4 months ago

The permanent underclass permeates everything.

zozbot2344• 4 months ago

Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities.

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.

rib3ye• 4 months ago

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.

mrguyorama• 4 months ago

That thing was a toy, not even remotely viable or even a meaningful step towards viability.

It was discussed here.

jorblumesea2• 4 months ago

they will get poor people to die fighting each other, as it works today.

Nevermark• 4 months ago

There isn’t an alternative to allocating resources with money because money is a just measure of value.

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.)

monknomo4• 4 months ago

I think this is a good way of thinking, and it suggests that breaking up large clumps of money and resources is a reasonable way forward

pixl977• 4 months ago

I mean, if any argument on why AI would extinct mankind, this is the most likely. Humans make no economic sense to an AI that controls all intellectual and manual labor. What do most humans have to reciprocate? Why not use the resources it gets to build more AI?

6510• 4 months ago

Fiat is actually a warped backroom version of money. It's a measure of trust I think? You could replace it with something that represents resources, perhaps even [future] labor.

scottyah4• 4 months ago

The problem is just how far USD has departed from the value. There are some funny tricks people pulled with abstract concepts and now people have found a way to "print" their own money. It's created a new power and influence shift because you can just go to the Finance or Tech worlds and get money instead of producing actual value to other humans.

gwerbin• 4 months ago

I like to call this "capitalist feudalism", and it appears to be the overt agenda of big business and their allies/agents in governments around the world, notably but not exclusively in the USA.

atomicnumber3• 4 months ago

Luckily electromagnetism is the great equalizer. I'm imagining guerrilla warfare involving giant (in terms of GWh stored) Jerry-rigged capacitors driving electromagnets that are lobbed into places that would be extremely unappreciative surprise recipients of magnetic fields with flux densities measured in full Teslas

gip• 4 months ago

I agree with the risk you’re pointing to. Money currently mediates access to resources through labor and markets.

We either need to redesign money or a novel way to mediate access to resources. I haven't seen any proposal to make that work, which is a bit scary.

tasuki2• 4 months ago

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?

0x4e2• 4 months ago

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 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”.

apercu3• 4 months ago

Sure, it might cure cancer, but… that’s just uncertain. Sure, we’ll go to space, but… we sure have many problems at home.

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.

coolThingsFirst• 4 months ago

Exactly. AI helps you do things faster which when done have no economic value whatsoever.

r0fl• 4 months ago

Does not benefit average Joe now I agree

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

rokkamokka• 4 months ago

Pretty big assumption of empathy there

levanten• 4 months ago

There is no guarantee that the asi would care about human beings at all. Personally, I can’t see why it would.

myrmidon• 4 months ago

But why would this ever happen? Why would the owners of land, construction material and machinery give those up for free to the average Joe?

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.

cortesoft• 4 months ago

The way AI can improve lives is if we finally start to share wealth amongst the people more. I don’t know if we will be able to do this politically, but it really is the only way society will survive.

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.

acessoproibido2• 4 months ago

Benefitting Joe Average was never the goal. Like all advances in tech it mainly benefits the elites.

TGower5• 4 months ago

How does AI truly benefit the average joe?

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.

bluefirebrand3• 4 months ago

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

pjerem2• 4 months ago

I genuinely don't want to be snarky but does the average joe needs a planet that is breathable and isn't burning or does he need even "more goods and services to go around".

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 ?

excalibur• 4 months ago

Sure, it might cure cancer, but… that’s just uncertain. Sure, we’ll go to space, but… we sure have many problems at home.

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.

edgarvaldes• 4 months ago

Idealism. Optimistic responses are based on a strong dose of positive idealism.

tylershuster• 4 months ago

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 little expertise, which applies to everyone.

threetonesun• 4 months ago

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.

atleastoptimal• 4 months ago

HN once again fails to use their imagination and speculate as to whether replicating human intelligence has any benefits

renewiltord• 4 months ago

Prompt better. This is 10k words most of which are just garbage filler. Utterly unreadable.

jorblumesea2• 4 months ago

As if this isn't intentional or an added benefit. AI is the wet dream of the capital class, no need to negotiate with greedy workers asking for rights and benefits. There will be a chasm between the wealthy and everyone else. the future is looking more and more like feudalism.

ctenb• 4 months ago

While the message is valid, it's ironic that this was clearly written by AI.

botswana994• 4 months ago

The dude has obviously never met a multimillionaire owner of an auto body shop, a house demolition business, or a plumber. Did they do well in high school calc class? No. Are they richer than the author? Yes

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.

triceratops2• 4 months ago

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

trillic2• 4 months ago

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?

dragonwriter2• 4 months ago

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

botswana994• 4 months ago

The SAT, like general intelligence, is half hard work and half inherited ability, from what I've read. Characteristics that you have no control over, like height, intelligence, race, or sex, should not determine your wealth. It should really be about hard work and character; that's fair. At least in the U.S., there are too many industries like law, venture capital, or VC-invested startup founders, where the pedigree of your school is what matters to your success.

ixlixl2• 4 months ago

AI automating (almost) all white collar work will concentrate all those salaries into the hands of a very small group of people.

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.

botswana994• 4 months ago

Neither statement is true, unfortunately. The reports that you read in the media don't reflect the state of the world. In the US, most plumbers and SWE make between 100-200K. The way to wealth is to start one's own business. Hence, hard work and character.

bloppe12• 4 months ago

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 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.

shafyy3• 4 months ago

You can't just look at real median income. You also need to look at other factors like wealth inequality, housing prices and health care.

bloppe12• 4 months ago

housing prices and health care are captured by the "real" part of "median real income". Inequality is not, but as long as everybody is getting richer, I'm less concerned about inequality.

Antoniocl• 4 months ago

Well, I think in the context of the parent comment, separating out housing would risk overstating changes in its effect on purchasing power because increases to housing would already be captured by inflation (since we're talking about real median income, which is already inflation adjusted)

I agree that housing affordability is a major problem and that looking at it independently could help you quantify if housing specifically has become more unaffordable, but that's a different question then whether the median person's overall purchasing power has declined (considering all of housing, healthcare food etc)

trolleski3• 4 months ago

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.

bloppe12• 4 months ago

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

repelsteeltje3• 4 months ago

I agree.

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.

apercu3• 4 months ago

Until I see median real income start to actually go down

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.

BobaFloutist• 4 months ago

According to a random inflation calculator I found with a lazy Google search, $50,000 in 1996 is about $106,000 today.

Was $50,000 a lot of money in 1996? Did it afford a nice house in a good neighborhood? Or is it that 6 figures just isn't what it used to be?

tim-projects• 4 months ago

I'm with you. If we all have access to AI then how is that a bridge being taken away?

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.

tengada1• 4 months ago

I think my concern would be if the relationship between model intelligence and inference cost was altered very significantly. I sort of feel like we got lucky that AI isn't arbitrarily scalable in a single instance

(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.

adverbly4• 4 months ago

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

bloppe12• 4 months ago

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. I don't see how these number are manipulated to the point of malicious data picking. They also publish their methodology.

hypercube33• 4 months ago

Sure but you have to run AI on something and today that's basically limited to multi-thosand dollar hardware - the price and effort to entry has to come down to make it make sense for normal consumers to move it out of the cloud to local.

est• 4 months ago

bridge to wealth

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

KaiserPro• 4 months ago

This was already "solved" in the 30-50s.

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.

z3t4• 4 months ago

Changing social class has always been very difficult. The solution is to get rid of social classes. Or at least try to even out the difference between the lowest class and highest class.

aerhardt• 4 months ago

Changing social class has always been very difficult

It's been very difficult in part because 150+ years of Marxist tradition has not been able to define what a class is. Upwards social mobility by other metrics such as wealth and income, both intra- and inter-generation, is actually provable and real.

jddj• 4 months ago

Leaving aside the sloppiness of the article, I think a lot of the behaviour in recent memory around crypto and meme stocks, and to an extent the whole rotating bubbles mode that markets seem to be in, can be attributed to this general trend.

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.

trolleski3• 4 months ago

10/10 - also brings to mind Peter Turchin theory of elite overproduction and the immiseration of the masses.

rdiddly• 4 months ago

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 "The drawbridge to wealth is being raised and then permanently damaged so it can't be lowered, by AI."

zarzavat• 4 months ago

Drawbridges do

kleiba• 4 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawbridge

yomismoaqui• 4 months ago

Maybe the author os thinking of a drawbridge (moveable bridge)?

bayeslaw6• 4 months ago

Finally a useful comment. Thank you :D

WillAdams• 4 months ago

LLMs look to be the first technological innovation which will not engender an accompanying expansion in the labour market and new jobs to match the increase in the size of the economy --- Karl Marx is finally right.

7777777phil• 4 months ago

The sims are really well done, the dynasty simulator especially. You can actually stress-test the argument instead of just nodding along. Appreciate the craft.

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..

sp1nningaway2• 4 months ago

I bounced off of this article because I didn't like the conclusion, then provided myself a rationalization that it was probably mostly AI generated. What inspired you to engage with the article more deeply? You agree with the conclusion, but not with any of the supporting arguments.

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?

cheesecompiler4• 4 months ago

The parent comment reads as an LLM to me as well.

bayeslaw6• 4 months ago

Thanks for the detailed reply, really appreciate it!

Re post agi world and coefficients: yupp totally agree. This isn't proper modelling. I just wanted something I can play around with to test my intuitions.

Re Jevons: ok let's say that latent demand is freed up. It's bounded by human purchasing power and the rate at which humans can actually consume the output.

Re programmer jobs, point taken, thanks for the clarification, I'll actually look this up properly. However there is other evidence suggesting that not all is well either https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...

Thanks again for reading!

waffletower4• 4 months ago

Despite the reductive Gaussian determinism, there appears to be much haunting truth to the proposed economic trajectory here.

gradus_ad3• 4 months ago

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 knowledgeable and forgiving partner and guide.

MeetingsBrowser• 4 months ago

Now, everyone has a knowledgeable and forgiving partner and guide.

Well, everyone who can afford the $500/month ultra max pro plan to access unlimited ad free LLMs

CodingJeebus• 4 months ago

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.

cheesecompiler4• 4 months ago

Rebuttal: we are yet to see this actually materialize beyond the theoretical fantasy. We have seen this with computers and internet already: the supposedly democratic technology consolidated in a few platform monopolies.

gradus_ad3• 4 months ago

Whether or not AI consolidates (even more than now) is irrelevant. The tech is extremely useful as a catalyzer of ideas and stimulus to action.

pbiggar• 4 months ago

The author mentions the French revolution, and that is a really important thing for the elites to understand. Class mobility -- as much as it existed because for a lot of people it didn't -- is what keeps the heads of the elites attached to their bodies.

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.

alansaber• 4 months ago

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.

miltonlost2• 4 months ago

, standard of living goes up

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.

pylua• 4 months ago

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 .

zozbot2344• 4 months ago

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

sourmike• 4 months ago

The author is saying there was some kind of class mobility around the start of industrial revolution/dawn of capitalism. Which is simply false.

miltonlost2• 4 months ago

Putting "intelligence" quantifiably on a bell curve in the first sentence of the abstract is enough to toss the rest of it out

unholyguy001• 4 months ago

Historically speaking the most reliable bridge has always been the edge of a sword

postexitus• 4 months ago

Some good arguments - it would have been much better if it was not LLM produced slop.

heliumtera• 4 months ago

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?

deadbabe• 4 months ago

At work, there is little reason to ask a human a question, you just talk to AI for answers fast. Only time to talk to another human, is if you are barking down orders. This will be analogous to not hiring a human for anything an AI could do, unless you need someone to assume liability.

rcarr• 4 months ago

The author's conclusion is fucking astonishing. Don't respond with bitterness - focus on your hobbies, friendships and love. Exactly how are people meant to do any of that exactly when, as you've just laid out, they are not going to have any ability to keep a roof over their head?

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.

fraywing• 4 months ago

Read The Dark Enlightenment by Nick Land.

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.

hluska2• 4 months ago

Like most people I’m not sure what the future looks like, but I’ve worked with generative AI closely and none of this doom matches my experience. At its best, generative AI is faster stackoverflow driven development. At its worst, generative AI is just as slow as stackoverflow driven development was. I don’t see it replacing intelligence because frankly, you need intelligence to work with it properly otherwise intelligent people will judge you for using AI badly.

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.

advael2• 4 months ago

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

pier253• 4 months ago

Most of the traits you were born with - intelligence ...

Intelligence is considered genetic now? That's quite a bold claim.

commandlinefan2• 4 months ago

Well, it's a _controversial_ claim, anyway.

magneticnorth• 4 months ago

Well, it's certainly inheritable from your parents (50%), and recent research suggests at least 20% of the 50% heritability is genetic, according to an article in Nature Reviews Genetics. [0]

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927/

DustinKlent6• 4 months ago

Not really a bold claim. The scientific consensus is that intelligence is a highly polygenic and heritable trait, with genetic factors accounting for 50%-80% of the variations in intelligence. The rest is environmental (prenatal care, education, nutrition, lack of exposure to toxins like lead, etc.)

tptacek• 4 months ago

Late to this, sorry for the necro-post, but this is not at all a consensus. The 50-80% number comes from twin studies from the 1990s and predates within-family and GXE, both of which knocked the estimates sharply back. "Highly polygenic" is probably doing the opposite of the work you're hoping it does. And, of course, "heritability" doesn't mean "genetically determined"; my propensity to wear lipstick (nil) is technically highly heritable, while my number of hands is barely heritable at all.

gradus_ad3• 4 months ago

"Wealth passed through property law: wills, trusts, title deeds, institutional relationships. No regression. No noise. Just compounding."

Slopspeak detected.

thornewolf• 4 months ago

I noticed this article is written by AI. Have you considered adding a disclosure?

pier253• 4 months ago

IQ → credentials → income → heritable wealth

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.

kjkjadksj6• 4 months ago

Relative to the peers in their own country they usually do. Globally, yeah people get shit hands. That is why doctors leave their countries, go through the trouble to relicense and practice in the US.

pier253• 4 months ago

Relative to the peers in their own country they usually do

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.

drillsteps5• 4 months ago

I actually printed this one out to give it a thorough read, something I haven't done in a while :) I'll probably comment on the author's blog later.

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.

highfrequency• 4 months ago

"The window described above is not a metaphor. It is an arithmetic deadline...The window is not a metaphor for someone at your coordinates. It is a number."

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!

enraged_camel• 4 months ago

I think it was AI-assisted at the very least. Nothing wrong with that, but it's always a good idea to make another pass to identify and remove LLM "tropes".

DustinKlent6• 4 months ago

I think that writers may stop using "It's not x, it's y" analogies in their writings because every time they do, someone calls it out for being AI. Same with "Em Dashes" and such.

BobbyJo• 4 months ago

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.

deaux6• 4 months ago

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.

hootz• 4 months ago

Yes, it is a sign of the widening wealth disparity. It's hard to stay moderate when your identity, security and existence is increasingly being threatened.

keiferski3• 4 months ago

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

wanderingpixel• 4 months ago

by the time the robots arrive for the physical jobs

Not to mention that physical jobs in e.g. manufacturing have been highly automated by "the robots" for decades

DustinKlent6• 4 months ago

I think he means the jobs that haven't yet been automated: plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, pipe fitters, dry wall layers, etc.

vessenes2• 4 months ago

Interesting points, made in florid style. I'd make the point a little differently, though -- in the next n years, you want to be on the side of capital. Labor is in for a really tough time.

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.

bayeslaw6• 4 months ago

Hey thanks for reading and for leaving a considered comment. You might be right, we'll see. In my mind, GDP growing isn't really that reassuring: 1/ GDP has been growing steadily while people's happiness and overall satisfaction is flat lined or finishing (so even if this was true it won't lead to better lives lived at scale) 2/ it's more interesting to look at the ratio of labour wages / GDP. I actually make a prediction about this and that has been shrinking already. If it continues (which I think it will) even if everything grows ppl will be unhappy and unsatisfied bc a large part of our self worth is coming from comparing ourselves w the ppl around us in the wider society. This is why more equal societies tend to be happier as well.

vessenes2• 4 months ago

Back at you! Writing's always work, especially with cool graphs.

1 - Agree this is true for real-earning-loss countries, recently. (as in last n decades)

2 - I agree this will keep shrinking. I moderately disagree with the 'comparative happiness' assessment.

It's that second bit that I think is an important prior for you to mention - there's an old (sexist, outdated, etc.) riddle: "A woman lives on Park Avenue and her husband makes $500k a year as a lawyer. She's miserable. Why?" Answer: "Her neighbour's husband makes $2mm."

I agree humans covet. On the other hand, there are real non-GDP type considerations for human happiness and comfort - for instance, I would guess nearly any French peasant in the 1820s would switch lives with 90% of western world residents. Maybe more. The peasantry in the early 19th century was, by population the vast majority. You can get at a lot of non-GDP quality of life benefits that genuinely impact people: anesthesia during surgery, GPS, air flight, ...

So, I propose generally humans want to be doing better than they used to, personally, and at least as well as their neighbors -- and if that's okay, they are historically totally fine with a ruling class, and susceptible to messaging that the ruling class is the ruling class for good reason. If they are doing less well than they used to, we have real problems.

To my mind if robots bring us bread and circuses, we'll have stability. (And super-wealth accumulation for capital). If robots bring us 40% unemployment, we'll have revolution. The funny thing is, those two outcomes are really just about social decisions by governments. So, I think we'll see a few different takes on this; over one hundred years, I think humans are going to figure this out. In the interim, we are likely going to see two early hot takes: US and China, and probably really different takes on how robots and AI can fill out the social contract.

Put another way - if we are headed to post-scarcity, what do we want to do with the excess?

DustinKlent6• 4 months ago

Total GDP increasing isn't a good measure of economic growth or productivity because it doesn't distinguish between productive value creation and money just changing hands. If I cut your hair and charge $50 and you cut my hair and charge $50 then $100 is added to the GDP. Sure, value is created by the transaction, but value would be created if no money changed hands at all thus not even affecting the GDP! GDP can also rise even as most people are doing poorly. A billionaire buying a superyacht adds the same amount to the GDP as 500 families buying their first home. You can have a growing GDP even in a society where the top .1% have 99% of the wealth, but that's not a society I'd want to live in.

drivebyhooting• 4 months ago

One thing I observed recently are all of the boarded up garage attendant offices/booths. I suppose automated ticket kiosks, and security cameras have made that job redundant.

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.

noobermin• 4 months ago

The opening paragraph bothers me greatly. "multiply a gaussian and a power law, the power law dominates." They literally are distributions of different variables, why would you "multiply" two different distributions that exist on different domains!? The example they're using as an opening is very wrong, it makes no sense and makes the author sound incompetent.

Even if I get the point they're trying to make (if I try hard to find it), the very fact that they don't even know how mathematics in the "mathematical" part of their opening does not inspire confidence in the rest of the essay. It's very hard for me to move past the opening after the very first few lines!

Perhaps this is just because I'm a scientist, I'm surprised no one is picking at this because I feel insane reading this and this not being the first nitpick at the top of every comment. The correct way you're represent this (dist of "life outcomes", whatever that means) is that it would be a 2D histogram with IQ and wealth on the different axes. But this is not "multiply the two" wherein "one would dominate".

bayeslaw6• 4 months ago

Cool, I'm a scientist too w a PhD and everything, I just don't make a big deal out of it - unlike you it seems. Granted, distributions don't get multiplied, random variables do. Funnily enough the essay's actual model (log(Y) = 0.35·zIQ + 0.45·zW + ...) is additive in log space, which is multiplicative in outcome space. The preface language is loose I grant you that but the formal model that appears later is well defined. Not sure what you want to say with a 2d histogram. We are modelling, not visualizing.

erelong3• 4 months ago

I've looked forward to the destruction of the credential system as it seemed "highly unjust" and like a top barrier to people's freedom (although it hardly seemed to be talked about as such). It locked people in to specific industries or locked them out in distasteful ways.

So I largely view AI in a positive light as cutting out this middle man to some extent.

The process might rather be:

IQ → skills → heritable wealth

Unfortunately the credentialed sometimes possess skills, but at other times "merely" possess the credential (so, they may not do a good job). Other people with skills might not possess credentials today and so society forcibly prevents them from using those skills (!) at times. It will be nice if AI nudges the "system" in to accwpting more work without required credentials.

Credentialing can still exist as a voluntary system and I don't per se object to that; it was more the involuntary aspects of credentials that have been off putting. (Although to some extent e en "voluntary" credentiala may not be as voluntary as there may be capital and biological constraints, as the article might get in to).

This conversation about credentials might ultimately loop back to considerations of primitivism, i.e. arguments that involuntary credentials are necessary to a highly advanced technological society, and so if anyone likes "freedom", they must be more in to "primitivism" and against technology, which necessarily "enslaves" people to a credentialed system and dependence on a highly interconnected technological system. Stated otherwise: if the credentials are not optional, then our society is something of a collection of people immersed in "technological slavery", rathee than free people who might live without respect to credentials or technology.

jmcqk62• 4 months ago

Credentials are a way to externalize trust. The trend with AI is to further erode trust. There will be a reaction against this eventually, and it's likely that more mechanisms to externalize trust will be found, not that they will become unimportant.

erelong3• 4 months ago

I think the problem is, compare credentials with reputation. A programmer who possesses no credentials might create "good" software that is validated as "good" even by those possessing credentials. However, a person with credentials related to programming, might produce malicious software that betrays the "trust" of the credential. Thus, just like the fallacy of the labor theory of value, credentials do not inherently relate to the production of heritable wealth. AI shines a light on this disconnect, and that actually the involuntary nature of certain credentials (as opposed perhaps to credentials themselves) creates certain classical impediments to the creation of wealth.

Thus, maybe credentials might be thought to be "necessary but insufficient" for achieving certain goals or validating trust. But even in this above example, the credential was not even necessary for the production of "good" software. AI of course simply exposes this truth as it gives more direct access to skills and knowledge to the average person: the (involuntary) credential was never necessary for doing some of these things, and we are able to remove the necessity entirely in some cases.

bayeslaw6• 4 months ago

Hey HN, author here.

Thanks a ton for the comments, really appreciate it.

It seems like a few of you haven't really read the piece before forming your opinion on it, which is understandable, it's super long. So here's a short version:

https://danielhomola.com/m%20&%20e/ai/your-bridge-to-wealth-...

Re the LLM accusations: it's true that I let Claude and Gemini suggest and streamline passages. It's a long piece of text and I was struggling with the tone of it (it touches on biology, stats, history sociology and ends w a letter to my kids) - it was hard to keep it coherent and stylistically cohesive. However saying this is AI slop is absurd. I'll just leave it at that.

I'll try to reply to some of the criticism individually.

Thanks again!

dahfizz3• 4 months ago

They are illustrations of a general principle: the legal inheritance channel compounds while the biological one reverts.

All this pseudo-math relies on the fact that family wealth strictly compounds and does not decrease or revert to the mean. But that is not true. Economists study this, and the exact numbers differ but family wealth _does_ revert back to the mean in just a few generations. Wealth does not stay in the same family compounding forever.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/378526

https://bnh.bank/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Heres-to-Your-We...

bayeslaw6• 4 months ago

Fair point on the rhetoric: "no regression, no noise, just compounding" overstates it a bit. Individual family wealth does dissipate across generations. The model actually reflects this: η=0.85 inheritance fraction, threshold gating that blocks compounding below ~$20k, and a residual term that captures the noise and bad luck - which your sources are measuring.

The stronger claim of the essa is different from "any given dynasty compounds forever." It's Piketty's r > g: capital returns have systematically outpaced economic growth, so the wealth class maintains and grows its share even as specific families within it churn.

tunesmith2• 4 months ago

The article says it's from first principles and looks pretty deep, and I didn't have the time to exhaustively read it myself, so I used my side project concludia to try and analyze and graph the argument... you can see the argument graph here if you're interested in that kind of thing.

https://concludia.org/step/6f3cbaa2-65d4-3c44-8c1f-23f6ddf2b...

Reading the thread below, I'm always curious where in the argument the various counterpoints would attach. Like if a counterpoint is fatal or just an offshoot. I didn't have the system try and semantically analyze it for flaws/counterpoints yet, I just tried to get it to depict the article's reasoning. Not sure yet how good a job it did.

swed4202• 4 months ago

Cool concept.

Have you considered submitting a Show HN post?

tunesmith2• 4 months ago

haha. Nervous to. :)

Yizahi• 4 months ago

Interesting article. People are nitpicking different issues but not many are addressing the core idea, and that idea I think is sound, regardless of the coefficients picked and so on. Inequality is rapidly increasing all over the world, it is cumulative and self reinforcing (people in power using their unequal wealth to pass laws making inequality even worse). Sure, maybe median income is steadily increasing. The enormous accumulation of wealth on top would quickly render income increase meaningless. Anecdote to illustrate - just yesterday someone took a photo of a new apartment complex (so already not a luxury segment at all) with an ad on a fence "new apartments for your collection". For "collection". So they already know who their market is - wealthy guys/corpos buying housing in bulk to flip for profit or rent. Today it's an isolated joke, tomorrow it will be a standard. Same with everything else - private transportation, above average education, even knowledge work would be a prestige thing.

Combine that with disillusioned poor strata electing right-wingers in hopes of solving inequality via xenophobia, but afterwards getting autocrats who are only interested in the personal enrichment and burning wealth ladder even faster, plus blocking any option to return to centrist government to preserve power (see Russia, Hungary etc.). The cumulative outcome of all of this is rather bleak. But median income will be a few percents higher, yahoo, amazing.

MrSkelter• 4 months ago

The premise of the article Is so easy to refute that it makes any conclusions drawn ridiculous.

Wealth and intelligence aren’t correlated at all. Wealth and education are quite strongly correlated but education isn’t intelligence.

The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

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