Mastodawn

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/

Your bridge to wealth is being pulled up

For two centuries, the credential system gave intelligence a route to heritable capital. Artificial intelligence is closing that route. This essay builds the argument from first principles - with probability theory, interactive simulations, and a prediction specific enough to be falsifiable - and puts a number on the window that remains.

Daniel Homola

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

Resource curse - Wikipedia

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 3d ago

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

This is still a "hard" problem from a scientific perspective. LLMs haven't taken us any closer to solving the perception, actuation, learning loop. It will require multiple new developments in material science and a new ML paradigm.

sdenton4 3d 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?

acessoproibido 3d ago

So you are saying essentially nothing changes ?

giacomoforte 3d 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.

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...

Wealth inequality in America just hit its widest gap in more than 3 decades

Nearly one-third of U.S. household wealth was held by the top 1% in the third quarter of 2025.

CalRobert 3d 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.

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”.

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 3d ago

Pretty big assumption of empathy there

levanten 3d ago

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

myrmidon 3d 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 3d 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.

> 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.

bluefirebrand 3d ago

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

stevehawk 3d ago

but elon said he would share the excesses with us!

edgarvaldes 3d ago

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

tylershuster 3d 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.

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.

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.

trolleski 3d 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.

> 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.

gradus_ad 3d 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 3d 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

alansaber 3d 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.