Bill Gates' fear is clearly that everybody thinks this stuff is just kind of mediocre because then the real horror story unfolds - Microsoft stock price collapses into blue chip territory where it firmly belongs.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Communi...

to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot

Daniel Kokotajlo had the closest prediction for our current world, 5 years ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-...

You should adjust that these are the kind of the people with the most prescient accuracy for where we are going again. Their world model is more accurate.

Kokotajlo authored: https://ai-2040.com/

If you compare the broad characteristics of the new jobs created to the old jobs displaced by technology historically, they are the same every time: they required higher-level (a) cognitive (b) technical or (c) social skills.

That is it. There is no other dimension to upskill along.

And LLMs are good at all three, probably better than most people already by many metrics. (Yes even social; their infinite patience is the ultimate advantage, and while sycophancy is harmful fixing it is easy.)

Plus AI is improving extremely rapidly. Which means it is probably advancing faster than most people can upskill.

An increasingly accepted premise is that AI can displace junior employees but will need senior employees to steer it. Consider the ratio of junior to senior employees, and how long it takes for the former to grow into the latter. That is the volume of displacement and timeframe to upskill we're looking at, made worse by the fact that if juniors are not hired they likely won't get a chance to upskill at all.

Never in history have we had a technology that was so versatile and rapidly advancing that it could displace a large portion of existing jobs, as well as many new jobs that would be created.

That's the whole gambit here: use the system and media to paint a pretty picture of <person so terrible they need PR>, trust that some non-trivial amount of the population will buy it, deny any wrong-doing publicly or on record. Hope they don't come for your head. Rinse and repeat.

The manually moved it down.

HN mods always silence even the slightest thing against their official narrative.

Since YC/HN are themselves pedos and connected to Epstein they had no choice but to squash it

They probably thought the HN audience would be too dumb or passive to do anything about it, helping them slowly get away with being international sec trafficking pedophiles.

And so far they are getting away with it. JPM Chase bank settled with victims for millions of dollars, other victims mysteriously died.

Thiel and tech and academia and Israel got prolific pedo Trump as the figurehead so they can try to shift blame to his “base” of racists Americans etc. but we all know it’s the wealthy corporate elite doing this stuff.

HN is complicit. They are basically a mouthpiece.

HN mods actively help wealthy pedophiles get away with their crimes

This is one of those countersmells that flags people as unserious. It was at best an amusing quip from the days of extended memory PCs about why they should move to modern OSes.

Gates, of course, was talking about the address mapping design points in software on a CPU that had 20 address bits. Unless you're arguing that 384k was too much for the paltry framebuffers actually deployed on 8086's and would have preferred a 896/128 split; in which case I agree! But alas.

We will figure new methods of scarce toy production. To believe otherwise seems delusional to me.

There is also this problem with UBI that I don't know how it can be solved. I see it in a certain percentage of people I know. Maybe 15-20%. As soon as they get paid that money is spent and usually spent on bullshit. Any hint of credit worthiness was used up a long time ago because it is the same process. If you gave them a daily morning UBI amount they would be broke by dinner and hungry. It is very hard to explain what causes this. To pretend this doesn't exist also seems completely delusional to me.

Nope. The actual main problem are those people who totally ignore the real costs of AI.

Remind me, when was the last time when billions and trillions of dollars were spent on workers (education, healthcare, insurance, etc. all together)?

You try to compare the capabilities without comparing the costs. That won't do.

The only thing I've ever seen work is to simply make a tool available to people while giving them meaningful resources to adopt it if they see utility in their specific situation. But admin hates this because it means that they are paying for a thing that some people aren't using and because they want to write "I've revolutionized teaching by integrating X" on their performance review and that doesn't work unless adoption is near-universal.

For AI shit in particular, the ideas have been trash. Mandatory AI summaries of course readings integrated into the discussion platform. Great, now nobody will do the reading. AI tools for "placing" you in history through image generation that constantly generate anachronisms because they are trained on fantasy art. Stuff like that.

We don't even need to assume this is out of the goodness of their hearts. Consider that Microsoft is one of the few Big Tech businesses whose business model is primarily making its enterprise customers more productive. If agents replace all knowledge work, half of Microsoft's business disappears.

In that sense Microsoft is more aligned with us humans than the other AI companies.

Because the pioneers haven't just been saying, but are screaming the quiet part out loud.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/07/how-bill-gates-m...

Software development, as opposed to many many other fields also offers nearly unlimited training data and is one of the few areas with modifiable inputs and testable outputs.

Tax profits, it was always the most equitable option.

It's powerful, and very useful in specific situations.

It's not the second coming of jesus christ.

And I kind of get it! If your primary exposure to AI is Google search summaries (from their cheapest models) and shitty AI graphic design, it makes sense to think it's vastly overhyped.

That the government collects taxes and then understaffs the department that distributes the benefit is the first fraud. 30 years after email was invented, why do people have to wait on the phone for hours to talk to a government employee?

Truly nobody else could have predicted that computers thinking would be important.

Can definitely tell why this guy makes gazillions per nanosecond.

Sadly, I agree, that's where this is all headed.

Absolutely right about war and technology too. Also right about plans being mostly useless.

Amazing analysis, thanks for this comment!

This is a baby step, but it's a baby step in the right direction.

> In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.

> When a community has high unemployment, the ripple effects can be pervasive. Research suggests that in some parts of the United States, factory closures contribute to a rise in deaths from opioid overdoses. Now imagine similar pressures on both white-collar and blue-collar workers nationwide.

> Waiting until people are already displaced or underemployed will be too late. AI is a structural challenge to the way our economy is organized, and it requires thinking and action now.

----

I agree he should've addressed UBI directly. When he was asked about it in an AMA a decade ago he basically said he's optimistic it can happen eventually but not yet [1]. And in that same AMA he said he wished to see "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" within his lifetime [2]. Now that the latter has happened I wish we could see how his thoughts have changed on the former.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea7v1...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea5fl...

Wait what?

This isn't hard to imagine? We'll elect someone, they will put in place new policies. Maybe they will help, maybe they won't.

Nice thing about real democracies, you don't actually need pitchforks.

IDK why so many people romanticize pauper riots and try to wish them into existence. In practice, as long as people don't outright starve, they don't become violent just over losing their jobs.

All the post-1989 wars east of the former Iron Curtain were triggered by nationalism. Not a single one by a class conflict.

>More than 90 percent of executives report no effect of AI use on employment over the past three years, and 89 percent report no impact on labor productivity. Among the minority that do report effects, the results tilt slightly positive for productivity, with an estimated average boost of 0.29 percent. However, executives anticipate much larger effects going forward. They forecast that over the next three years, AI will increase labor productivity by 1.4 percent on average while reducing employment by 0.7 percent, implying a net output gain of roughly 0.8 percent. About two-thirds of the anticipated workforce reduction is expected to come from reduced hiring.

https://www.nber.org/digest/202605/global-evidence-business-...

A 1-2% increase in labor productivity year over year is typical for a mature economy in the absence of a new transformational technology. The 0.7% reduction in workforce is an optimistic prediction by a small minority of executives. Even if that happened across all industries (unlikely), an increase in unemployment from 4.1% to 4.8% over 3 years is hardly pitchfork territory.

Given the current evidence, I find it hard to imagine a realistic scenario where "a few hundred million people get angry within one election cycle". That might change if we see economy-wide 10% productivity gains sustained over a decade, but I'm not holding my breath.

The only reason they tolerate the proletariat is the need for labor to handle tasks that still require human beings. That’s what the modern capitalist machine does: it harvests labor. If they manage to eliminate the need for intellectual labor via AI and automate enough physical work using tech like Boston Dynamics and John Deeres, whoever's still around become trash. The reliance on this system of money flowing back and forth ends, because the only reason to maintain it is having people generate wealth for them. Once they can eliminate that "cost," they’ll do it without blinking.

We’re already seeing jobs being wiped out by the tens of thousands with the arrival of AI, and billionaires hoarding capital far beyond what they could ever consume, driven simply by the pleasure of having more than the next guy. We’ve also seen how some are depraved enough to treat human beings as mere resources for their own gratification. Why would them keep people around they don't need anymore? People are failable, expensive to keep and unreliable. If all can be automated, it will be. Expecting wealth distribution from them is also a fantasy. If they cared they would do it now, but the talk is always "when we reach certain goal the riches will tricke down, just wait."

The argument that "there won't be anyone left to buy products and keep capitalism running" might hold true during a transition phase, but that would just be like ripping off a Band-Aid. None of them super-rich will care about the money flow once this structure becomes obsolete and can be replaced by another system that’s more efficient and easier to control.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Many people like living next to other people purely for social reasons.

Umm what? Humans are social animals and many people LIKE living in cities in close proximity to other people and close to amenities. I do not see a future where we decentralize and spread out because of AI.

It brings people together for mating.

It wasn't only industrialization.

Even today, before AI, once you find a mate, THEN, you move to the suburbs.

https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/direct-democrac...

FWIW I am not from Switzerland, I only live there. Direct democracy works great.

These people making these kind of grand pronouncements either have an embarrassing blind spot, or are not making sincere, but carefully calculated statements.

Just via competition, Chinese researchers are doing much more than Bill Gates could ever hope to do through 'thought leadership' spread the benefits of generative AI.

You'll be waiting forever, then. This isn't something that you can wait to be given to you, it must be taken.

Or, put much more eloquently by one of the greatest Americans:

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress"

- Frederick Douglass

Why do we not push for labor reform, as we did a century ago? Depending on the actual productivity gains from AI broadly, set a new standard of 4-hour workdays. Or 3-day work weeks.

There is no preparing for that.

I doubt we get there to be honest, they all have wealth and power because there are consumers with money. No more consumers, no more wealth and power.

Notice that when you open your mouth, there is no roast chicken that flies in.

For example, you go to the store to get eggs, since everyone has UBI, they decide to also get eggs, the eggs either run out, or the store raises the price, at which either you will get food queues like in the USSR, or everyone will need more UBI to afford eggs. The solution to this is to increase egg production, but this is not instant, and not necessarily a priority, while money transfers are instant.

I'm curious, how? He proposes taxing bots in lieu of taxing humans, because they will be doing most of the work... but we already tax humans, and it hasn't hurt open source.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5whpqs/comment/dea5fl...

>The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.

>Another whole area is vaccines. We need a vaccine for HIV, Malaria and TB and I hope we have them in the next 10-15 years.

It can code and we saw it eat(ing) our former occupation, but that was always a defined finite space with defined rules and to be frank, not as hard as us practitioners liked to believe. So I don't think we can extrapolate this progress out to every other human endeavor in the near term at least.

More automation is coming though most likely.

It was 2022 when this happened.

And some people are still stuck on what AI was capable of when GPT-3.5 was SOTA. They don't realize how much they've improved in ~4 years. Even if the rate of improvement slows down, AI will be tremendously more capable in another ~4 years.

They think they will be they ones leading the riots (the precariat will defer to them because they are "smart" apparently?) instead of they themselves being the ones being swarmed by rioters for visibly being just a little too well off.

And yet I see videos all the time of Indians running contraptions straight out of the steam age in their shacks to make plastic straws or sandals. Or just doing it by hand. Better machines to do these tasks already exist, but are obviously too expensive for them to afford. Why would these hypothetical robots be any more affordable or disruptive to Indian workers in particular?

If anything I think American blue collars would be the ones to worry about.

Ugh, capitalism.

Our current social structure is actively resistant to decentralization and I don't see that changing unless there is some forcing function to break that hold and keep it broken for new norms to settle into expectations.

> Nice thing about real democracies, you don't actually need pitchforks.

Democracy is not something inherent in any society. It’s a tool wielded by the people.

Personally I think the idea of taxing robots/tokens directly is too narrow an idea.

if their voices are overrun by the powerful, the pitchforks come back out.

Xinjiang is an exception; it is heavily publicly surveilled.

Internet censorship is strong. The public still has sway over government policy. When search terms are blocked, the public continues with euphemisms. The government is responsive to public opinion. The government does promote influencers with opinions favorable with CCP goals.

Chinese foreign policy is more dovish than public opinion, especially regarding Taiwan.

More importantly, even if it did contain the solution, there is no obvious way for a country with an already corrupt government to transition to such a thing.

You're using a rhetorical device to imply that they're "falling for" a narrative. "Falling for" only follows if that's why they are making the prediction; this construction doesn't allow that they may have come to this belief on their own.

It's one of those unfortunate aspects of internet information silos where people repeat this phrase to each other but don't really contextualize their opinions in the greater body of history and political thought.

Additionally, I think a lot of people with this opinion don't realize the vast difference in material standards we have today and what was true in the age of Communist revolution and decolonialization. It's tempting to think of material standards as relative and I think inequality is indeed a destabilizing factor in socities, but minimum material standards are true in so much of the world today that I think a class-conscious revolution is much harder in most of the developed and developing world absent other external political forces (e.g. nationalism, decolonoialism, etc)

Oryx and Crake, I think, was the first time I encountered that idea.

So there is also a question, what would be happening to these.

The rest of us want to be able to eat once capitalism decides we aren't worth the cost to keep alive.

Is what you're saying that since UBI would disconnect someone's production from their income, then this will cause shortages of goods? I think UBI only works if the income generated by it is tied to production. That production would not be generated by human labor, but instead by robot labor. I think if you disconnect that then the system would not work, but why would you need to?

The majority of the slave labor in prisons in the US make from nothing at all to 50 cents per hour.

The powers that be will still shamefully be exploiting that labor source long after AI/robots are capable of cheaply doing that work.

Now some will be unlucky and end up with a clone that makes them way less than average. So to fix this the salaries of all the clones are put into one pot and redistributed as "UBI". Given the wealth disparity, most people would end up better off than before, the high earners of the past will be a bit worse off though.

But of course we are not in a perfect world, in reality there are many inefficiencies, and no company would accept a 100% AI worker tax. However, these AIs are presumably not just our clones, but 100x better. So we are in a position of abundance not scarcity. There's enough eggs for everyone. It becomes a question of distribution and policy

Even during the Great Depression ,a period of record wealth inequality and much worse economic conditions, this did not happen.

New paradigm is a push for no workers at all which sounds a lot messier to fix as you start regulating how many employees a business has. How do contractors work? And if the contractors are robots?

This includes my teenager, who socks away $30/week in a VOO fund account. But yeah, no one can afford to "own (shares in?) the robot factories."

hell, if actors are still making movies for the love of the game and competing with cheaper (SOMEHOW! I guess we forgot about Sora already) then the price on those will actually go down

oh no, more indie movies made out of the labor of love, the horror.

If someone else hasn't given a thought yet to Liquid Democracy, I propose they give it a couple of minutes of imaginary thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy

For some real world data there are some studies about (I think) German branch of the Pirate Party using it in internal decision making and there is interesting insight for those curious.

It be nice if we all where allowed to vote on particular laws if interested, and defer certain topics to our delegated experts. (Chat Control for example, would be a non issue then.)

The technology for that approach has been mature enough since the rise of social media and private crypto currencies (as a means of electronic private vote, particularly around usage of smart contracts for delegation). What about the interest and spreading of these ideas? Pretty limited, to non-existent. Some people like to follow leaders, though naturally wouldn't expect it to be the silent majority.

given all of the issues with people getting attached to their online girlfriend -- it's already happening

Instead of everyone working less what happened is less people work. The fact that it took that specific shape is a source of A LOT of problems.

If your measure of "success" is women gaining voting rights in 1990 (!) in the last canton, then yeah, Switzerland is doing great.

UBI is how capitalism keeps going, else a new system will be needed.

UBI will be given but we should take even more control and take a % of ownership.

What does the data and observations tell us so far, in this context?

Capitalism is based on two simple, fundamental assumptions about the world:

- everyone works

- everyone consumes

1. Turned out not to be true. We have disabled people, elderly people. We patch it with legislation like SSI. That only works because everyone else is still working.

Our monkey patch solutions have held up well for a long time. But, if either of those two assumptions are broken in a large way, the entire system collapses. UBI is yet another monkey patch. As you know, it won’t hold if we bend the invariants of the system enough.

Eventually, a fully planned economy will not be optional.

As for Kokotajlo, he's a good SF author, but I don't think it's nearly as good a prediction as it appears at first glance.

Like any SF, he's correct about some things, and way, way off base about others. Specifically, he was mostly correct about short-term (1-2 year horizon) technical aspects, but anyone familiar with how transformers work would have guessed those. I'm not even in AI/rationalia land, but believe I was having these exact conversations by 2021. Specifically about multimodality and steam-of-consciousness ['chain of thought' reasoning]. He is spot-on about chip shortages (to my eyes, his most well-done prediction).

Other thoughts are a storytelling device, like a well-told horoscope. He makes non-categorical statements that were already happening as if they categorically will become a new thing. But really he's just going off the current trend that everyone knows, and thus will be nearly-impossible to falsify. For example, 'People who still remember 2021 think of it as the golden days, when conformism and censorship and polarization were noticeably less than they are now. Just as it is normal for newspapers to have a bias/slant, it is normal for internet spaces of all kinds—forums, social networks, streams, podcasts, news aggregators, email clients—to have some degree of censorship (some set of ideas that are prohibited or at least down-weighted in the recommendation algorithms) and some degree of propaganda.' Sounds scary! But it is literally just saying 'polarization and marketing specialization will continue to deteriorate'.... which, duh. In essence, you could make this statement for 2018-> 2021, or for 2008->2018 and 'feel' just as correct!

Other key thoughts were somewhat off. Specifically, 'It now costs an order of magnitude less compute (compared to 2020) to pre-train a giant model' is kind-of-true, in that it costs less now, but the models have gotten so much bigger that the prices haven't actually gone down much. Might be changing soon, but definitely several years off.

The scariest central prediction that the political stuff rests on is 'After years of tinkering and incremental progress, AIs can now play Diplomacy as well as human experts'. This part, as far as I can tell, is just not true and hasn't changed.

And, well, 2026 predictions are just not correct at all. Some examples: 'Mormons create a “Christian Coalition” internet stack, complete with its own email client, social network, payment processor, news aggregator, etc.' -- basically untrue. I know a few ex-mormons, such a thing is not prolific.

'The US and many other Western governments are gears-locked' The US is far from gears-locked, in fact, it's full-steam ahead to er, well, something.

'“Should I wear shorts today?” “Order some more toothpaste, please. Oh, and also an air purifier.” “Is this cover letter professional-sounding?”' -- kind of correct, but in practice most people just do the last one. I'm not aware of many that give chatgpt agents credit card access (refer to the famous vending machine experiment). But predicting this with GPT3 is not that crazy, cause people were already doing that.

Personally, I am much more biased towards the METR timelines/way of thinking: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/deesrjitvXM4xYGZd/metr-measu...

I found Kokotajilo's response comment to this kind of, idk, immature, and not especially mathematical.

That's half the battle. The other half is closing all the loopholes and making stuff that used to be illegal, illegal again (e.g. stock buybacks).

> Gates acknowledged that some reinvented toilets, in small volumes, could cost as much as $10,000, but added, “That will pretty quickly come down.”

I added an extra zero, sorry, I read it 8 years ago. But still doesn't really matter, even the optimistic 500 USD is laughable.

Dovish as in it will be annexed in the next decade and not next week?

in this case a ratio of 196 points to 479 comments points to a very poorly received yet comment-inspiring article.

"> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test."

Is because reddit is threatened enough by "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" the he's locked out of it!

https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/php/public-health-strategy/malar...

It has nothing to do with that, scrapers can still scrape new reddit. This is just a hostile action to move visitors to a site that shows more ads.

Yes if theres one thing we know about Chips and AI its that the price of equivalent performance literally never decreases...

abandon that entire apperatus and just cut people a check.

even glenn beck called it out w/ obamacare -- "if total spending is $3million per person [it wasn't, btw], then why not just cut every person a check?"

see also: the German far right pending a takeover, or like, half of all politics in India

(1) National Park visit a year (3) RoboTaxi rides this week (2) Eggs for the week

Who will do the planning? Why would the population accept this planning?

You will in practice need full surveillance and control of your population and an agreement between every country that this is how we are going to do things.

At that point you can also ask the question what value humans provide at all. Why upkeep all of this when you can just expand compute, perform resource extraction instead of managing your cattle.

Ultimately people will remain enterprising status-seekers. Rich people can already sit around with their wealth doing fuck-all excepting consuming, and they don't.

Let's assume that the stock market 10xes in the next decade, then the median American stock owner can get out $16,000/year.

* About 87% of adults with a household income of $100,000 or more own stock; compared to just 28% of those earning under $50,000.

* Only about 37% of adults hold stocks, bonds, or funds outside of a retirement account.

* Between 55% and 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are one large expense or missed paycheck away from homelessness.

* While some paycheck-to-paycheck workers technically own small amounts of stock, the actual value they hold is minimal.

* The wealthiest 10% of Americans own roughly 90% to 95% of all U.S. stock value.

Compared with the United States, public health care is less available in China. Retirement pensions are an order of magnitude lower (even with PPP adjustment), hence their world-leading savings rate. Social mobility is lower: getting a permit to access social services such as schools in a new city is difficult. Youth unemployment was above 25% the last time it was published; it is no longer disclosed.

Rule of law is much less strong. Injustices committed by government officials towards citizens are unlikely to be addressed.

Housing costs to income ratios are an order of magnitude worse in cities with job opportunities.

The Chinese government has chosen to allocate capital toward industrial output at the expense of its citizens' welfare. It has succeeded at its goal. Perhaps in the future more capital allocation will be made to consumption. That is not the case at the current time.

Just look at real estate prices in New York, SF, Boston, etc. Yes, people REALLY like cities. Even the wealthiest people who can afford anything still choose cities

Maybe we can eventually “trick” the human brain, but I think it will be much more challenging than people think. I would imagine if people even just knew someone was a robot, the jig is up. For most people. It wouldn’t be enough to create the perfect humanoid robot. We’d also have to make them hidden in plain sight. Full Ex Machina style.

The upper class live in walled neighborhoods with private guards. There's a small merchant class, and then the majority of the population are working class. Much of Central and South America live like this.

For the ultra rich psychos who run the show, do you really think they want poor people hanging around? When we can be wiped out in a few months?

Consider the pure greed Donald Trump is displaying. Now imagine that the 1000 most powerful people are the same, except they are smart enough to at least not rub it in peoples faces on live television.

They hate you, and want you dead.

The part you've got wrong here is thinking that Capitalism is equivalent to innovation and growth, which it is not. Capitalism simply serves capital, and with less and less of its constraints being physically bound to resources, there is very much a plausible world in which only a small handful of consolidated bank accounts exist so long as those bank accounts can reasonably control the monopoly of violence.

There is a point historically in which Capitalism absolutely served to provide widespread innovation and prosperity at scale, but this is not a feature of capitalism inherently but rather a consequence of it when run within the existing system of labor mechanics at the time. Capitalism can still very much exist within a Feudal structure of governance, its contributions to society will be much lesser, but it can still very much exist.

Marginal income taxes are regressive now in the sense that folks with more wealth have far more resources to avoid paying them, but otherwise the reasoning seems less regressive than a consumption tax (e.g. VAT)

> I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.

A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net. It would need to be targeted so it does not slow down the purely beneficial uses of AI, like making medicine and education cheaper.

Note the part about it being targeted. Clearly this is in the context of moderating the displacement of human labor by employers rather than a flat "TAX ALL THE TOKENS!" approach.

https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect

The top 10% of consumers accounted for half of all spending in the second quarter of 2025.

Capitalism will happily chug along while leaving a massive number of people desperately poor.

There's a reason the AI CEOs have all become obsessed with the concept of a "permanent underclass."

If a UBI is ever "given" it will be just enough to keep the underclass from rising up and killing the owner class and not one cent more.

This sounds more a product of censorship rather than China being particularly better in those aspects. Police in China are less likely to kill you because guns are uncommon, but they are just as shady if not more, especially in more remote areas. Healthcare access and affordability are also worse than what you'd expect from a communist country. Homelessness in China is definitely a lot worse than what state numbers suggest. They just drive out homeless people who they're less visible.

That's surprisingly high. I know several people with millions in their retirement accounts and nothing outside. It is also not uncommon for people to prefer real estate investment outside of retirement accounts. Both of these groups are wealthy but both would be excluded from this statistic.

> Between 55% and 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are one large expense or missed paycheck away from homelessness.

This "statistic" is based on definitions so misleading or unrigorous as to be meaningless. Nor is it derived from any of the data sources that are the gold standard for this type of economic research.

US Federal Reserve and BLS studies are broadly recognized authoritative sources for these types of economic statistics. Per these sources, the percentage of American households that have income that is entirely consumed by necessary expenses is 10-15%.

In the US, the median household has a ~$15,000/year surplus after all ordinary (not necessary) expenses per US statistical authorities. This surplus has been growing over time, so it isn't like it is at risk of disappearing either. This data alone obviously contradicts your assertion that most Americans are "one large expense or missed paycheck away from homelessness".

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3epygq5272o

Is it? Or is it dependent on the consumption of someone much greater than you.

For example: I was reading something the other day about dining experiences in Las Vegas. Really though, the video was about how recently Vegas has abandoned the traditional middle class patrons in favor of providing experiences to a smaller, but much wealthier clientele. This seems to be a trend across many industries. In some cases your consumption is even a cost center to be eliminated in favor of a more successful customer base.

In my humble opinion, they are the epitome of uncool.

> Between 55% and 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are one large expense or missed paycheck away from homelessness.

Is simply untrue

> do you really think they want poor people hanging around?

Which by your rationale would include everyone who isn't rich (and tautologically would mean "no one is rich anymore"). They do not care whether we're hanging around, the same way they do not care now whether poor people exist. It has no bearing. All that does is whether they remain rich and powerful, and last I checked, that's relative. Being the only one left on the planet won't make you feel rich, and there being poors on a piece of land won't have any bearing on you.

> When we can be wiped out in a few months?

Lol

Also, on the population front, growth is poised to completely stall in less than 100 years. The fertility rate is terrible in developed countries, and falling quickly in developing ones as they get richer

You're reflecting the populist notion that wealth is zero-sum. If that were true we'd still be in caves fighting over sticks. The average quality of life has skyrocketed in the last century alongside growth, and there's no non-capitalist country now or in history that's been an enviable place for average people to live.

A little bit of wealth distribution exists within American capitalism, through monkey-patches like I mentioned. But full wealth distribution is a new economic system altogether.

It’s changing in the US with Democratic Socialists over performing, and with high support for them with the under 35 cohort, the question is if this momentum can be sustained for years through various election cycles (as ~2M 55+ voters age out every year, and ~3M voters turn 18 and age into the electorate every year).

“Progress occurs one funeral at a time.” — Max Planck

It depends on what you mean by "comfortable."

A lot of people who moved to less populated areas found they weren't fully prepared to live with fewer amenities and choice in every aspect of life, from hospitals to supermarkets to mates.

There was a meaningful post-COVID return to cities and it wasn't driven exclusively by return to office mandates.

it's not for nothin that they've been slipping Zachariah 13:8 into discussions that show up in places like 8chan or ssethtzeentech videos

"Declares the LORD: 'in all the land, two-thirds will be cut off and perish, but one-third will be left alive' "

The marketing and agit-prop types would call this "priming" or "conditioning"

Well, nice to meet you, I'm a city dweller who works from home and can technically live where ever I want. I choose the city because I like it and I want my family to have nice things. I like walking to the kid's school and not owning a car and being close to amenities.

It can be easy to mistake a parasitic relationship for a predatory one.

they used to send 9 year olds to the mines. mortality rates were as high as 50% before they turned 20.

why do you think the AI robber barons are any nicer? it is painfully obvious they're not. and all of this is set to a backdrop of global ecological collapse.

From their methodology:

> The Modern Wealth Index, developed in partnership with Koski Research and the Schwab Center for Financial Research [...] was conducted by Koski Research from January 12 to January 19, 2018, among 1,000 Americans aged 21 to 75. Quotas were set so that the sample is as demographically representative as possible. The margin of error for the total survey sample is three percentage points.

Anecdotally, this percentage makes sense to me based on roughly half of the people in my circles/family/life living paycheck to paycheck, but there's obviously some exposure bias at work there too. It's possible you have some exposure bias as well if that number seems too high for you.

Yeah, at the advent of the industrial revolution. And prior to that 80% of people had to work the land, with no ammonia, just horses and manure.

Labor conditions from over a century ago, before the laws were written, have no bearing on whether wealthy people would try their best to kill you "just because". That's nonsensical.

"Nice" has nothing to do with it.

According to some recent data[0], 22% of households earning above $250k report themselves as living paycheck to paycheck. That alone tells me that the term can have very different meanings for different people. Perhaps those high earners mean that after all the taxes, retirement and ESPP deductions are taken out of their paycheck, what's left over is just enough to pay for their lifestyle. That's not what I would call paycheck-to-paycheck. And whatever the definition, I can assure you that 22% of the households in that income bracket are not a paycheck away from homelessness.

[0] https://www.lambdafin.com/articles/percent-of-americans-livi...

The whole reason trillions are being spent on AI and not making thing better for little people is because we don't want to have to depend on them anymore for anything... you know, so we can get rid of them. Having 8 billion people alive at once is a huge liability.