If the AI industry achieves its short-term goals, instead of paying a human $100,000/year to do some desk job, companies will pay Microsoft/Google/OpenAI/whoever $20,000/year in API tokens and keep the extra money for themselves. To me, this doesn't seem like a way to reduce wealth inequality, it seems like a way to accelerate it. Sure, there's nothing inherent to AI that makes it cause wealth inequality. However, literally every innovation in human history that allows a single worker to generate more value has caused most of that extra value to get captured by the ownership class. I don't see how AI will be any different.

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fragmede 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Even if it costs $100k/yr in GPU and RAM, the robot's preferable. It doesn't get sick, it doesn't have a family, it doesn't show up hungover, it doesn't sleep. It can be copy and pasted and duplicated and turned off as necessary.

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jstummbillig 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The point is that instead of having to complain about the ownership class, you can now be an owner more easily than before. AI enables people to do more on their own. You can build stuff that simply was not feasible before. You still have to do it though.

If you prefer to be subject to the ownership class, I recommend being honest about why that is.

	▲	ndiddy 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		In that case you're still subject to the companies who have billions of dollars to spend on training frontier models and server farms full of GPUs. They're free to change their pricing or the quality of the services offered at will (see the recent Claude Code limit changes). Long-term, what you're describing would be a ton of underpaid "entrepreneurs" with no benefits all working away on whatever B2B SaaS web app while all the real money gets made by the AI services they subscribe to. It would be similar to how Uber has "democratized" taxis.
	▲	weakfish 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I, for one, just don't really believe that there's enough market for every person to have their own software business. There's only so many ideas that are interesting enough to be sold.

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buu700 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Big companies may save money on salaries, which would have first-order effects on the job market — but you could say the same about cloud computing, or computers, or mechanical reapers. Now what about all the companies that previously couldn't afford to exist because someone with a good idea didn't have six+ figures of discretionary income to throw at it?

If AI proves useful enough to effect sustained savings for Big Tech to the degree that you're suggesting, then the flip side of that coin is that it's effectively ZIRP on steroids for startups. The successful businesses which come out of that will ultimately have human labor needs of their own. Job market continues to trend upwards, only with lower concentration and greater overall resulting economic value in the form of more products and services.

Or AI/robotics/etc. gets so good that eventually no one needs human labor, and every company trends toward just being a CEO + board + AI. In that world, unless we expect everyone and their grandma to become an entrepreneur, something to the effect of a UBI would be necessary to keep the world turning without major societal upheaval.

On the other hand, AI skeptics can plan to sit back and eat popcorn while they watch the bigcos suffer the consequences of their mistakes and yield ground to startups. Either way, AI will have been a democratizing force.