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Comments (334)

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  cglan
  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
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  0x4e
  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”.
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  bloppe
  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.
• tunesmith
  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.
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  dankai
  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.
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  alansaber
  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.
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  jddj
  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.
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  rdiddly
  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."
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  noobermin
  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".
• gradus_ad
  >"Wealth passed through property law: wills, trusts, title deeds, institutional relationships. No regression. No noise. Just compounding."Slopspeak detected.
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  dahfizz
  > 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/10.1086/378526https://bnh.bank/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Heres-to-Your-We...
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  gradus_ad
  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.
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  lagniappe
  >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?
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  vessenes
  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.
• drivebyhooting
  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.
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  pier25
  > IQ → credentials → income → heritable wealthThis doesn't make much sense. Lots of people with high IQ don't have high income because they were born in the wrong country.
• est
  > bridge to wealthNot only wealth, many human beings will be "sterilized" by social networks and AI.The "bridge" and another name in biology: cellular differentiationImagine 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
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  highfrequency
  "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!
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  BobbyJo
  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.
• advael
  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
• KaiserPro
  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.
• unholyguy001
  Historically speaking the most reliable bridge has always been the edge of a sword
• drillsteps5
  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.
• z3t4
  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.
• keiferski
  A thing I've noticed with AI-written articles (like this one) is that they have a difficult time articulating their actual point. They seem to be trained on what I'll call "Gish Gallop [1] bloggers", where the intent is just to overwhelm the reader with data and arguments, so many that replying to them all in a comment would take hours. This style is especially popular amongst the chattering-about-AI-classes, hence its popularity in AI discussions.There is no thesis, no central interesting concept to discuss, and instead just charts, data, fancy economic words, and increasingly elaborate predictions. I don't think it's good writing and I don't think it's good thinking. There are many important philosophical discussions to be had about LLMs and their impact on society, but this post is just a mess.But just to respond to one point: this argument seems to fall apart if you don't assume that blue collar jobs inevitably lead to white collar jobs:* But the jobs their kids would have used to climb - the junior admin role, the data entry job, the entry-level legal assistant - those are gone first. The ladder gets removed one generation before the people who needed it were old enough to climb it. By the time the robots arrive for the physical jobs, the route up will already be closed.*First off, "by the time the robots arrive for the physical jobs" is science fiction, the mention of which really undercuts any attempt at serious thought here. But more importantly, blue collar professions are doing very well right now. If a young person from a modest background were interested in building wealth, they'd almost certainly be better off becoming an electrician today, rather than a junior admin. I see no reason why the economy can't just shift to deprioritize certain types of rote knowledge work (the only real type of work at risk of LLMs, IMO) and prioritize types of work that can't easily be automated. There is no iron law of economics that says white collar work must pay better than blue collar work.1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
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  pier25
  > Most of the traits you were born with - intelligence ...Intelligence is considered genetic now? That's quite a bold claim.
• thornewolf
  I noticed this article is written by AI. Have you considered adding a disclosure?
• anon
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  7777777phil
  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..
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  SilverElfin
  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?
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  botswana99
  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? YesBlowing 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.
• heliumtera
  >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?
• sourmike
  The author is saying there was some kind of class mobility around the start of industrial revolution/dawn of capitalism. Which is simply false.
• ctenb
  While the message is valid, it's ironic that this was clearly written by AI.
• WillAdams
  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.
• rcarr
  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.
• deadbabe
  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.
• miltonlost
  Putting "intelligence" quantifiably on a bell curve in the first sentence of the abstract is enough to toss the rest of it out
• waffletower
  Despite the reductive Gaussian determinism, there appears to be much haunting truth to the proposed economic trajectory here.
• croes
  It is already pulled up before, AI just pulls faster
• bayeslaw
  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!
• anon
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• pbiggar
  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.
• anon
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• renewiltord
  Prompt better. This is 10k words most of which are just garbage filler. Utterly unreadable.
• fraywing
  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.
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• jorblumesea
  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.
• therealdeal2020
  oh gee doomsday is coming yeah yeah
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  erelong
  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 wealthUnfortunately 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.