AI is just one part of a larger and longstanding conversation about the future of work in an era of automation. We've long speculated that at some point we won't need the entire population to do all the work. Economists have talked about 20% of the population doing the work.

This can go one of two ways:

1. Fewer jobs will be used to further suppress wages. What little wages people earn will be used for essentially subsistence living. The extreme end of this is like the brick kiln workers in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. A lot of people, myself included, call this neofeudalism because you will be a modern day serf. The welath concentration here will be even more extreme than it is now. We're also starting to see this play out in South Korea; or

2. The created wealth will elevate the lowest among us so work becomes not required but a bonus if you want extra. The key element here is the removal of the coercive element of capitalism.

To put this in perspective, total US corporate profits are rapidly approaching $4T per quarter. That's roughly $60,000 per US adult. Some would call that the exploited surplus labor value.

Here's another number: we've spent something like $10T on the War on Terror since 9/11. What could $10T buy? Quite literally everything in the United States of America other than the land.

What's depressing is that roughly half the country is championing and celebrating our neofeudalist future even though virtually none of them will benefit from it.