dankai3d ago

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
Show threadcglan
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

Mar 24 at 3:22pmWeb
Show threadrmah3d 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).
Show threadenergy1233d ago
Robots will eventually be better than people at manual labor. I don't claim to know when that crossover will happen.
Show threadglitchc3d ago
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.
Show threadsdenton43d 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?
Show threadacessoproibido3d ago
So you are saying essentially nothing changes ?
Show threadgiacomoforte3d 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.

Show threadbix63d 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...

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.

Show threadCalRobert3d 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.