I hope this results in a rebalancing of the social and economic power of high-IQ versus average-IQ workers. We will need construction workers and tradespeople to build and maintain these AI data centers. Probably even with robots. But we won’t need as many engineers, lawyers, and other people whose job it is to consume and generate bits. If we tax the proceeds of AI generated productivity sufficiently, this could be the beginning of returning to the dynamics of the 1940s-1960s, where economic power was more concentrated among skilled blue collar workers than it is now.

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polotics 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Are you serious about this imbalance? it's the seriously rich that have taken all of the spoils, that's where the massive imbalance is.

I'm not disagreeing that some manual work require forms of intelligence that are undervalued in our society, and don't get me started about nurses, but still: What the Jeff Bezos!

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rayiner 5 days ago | parent [-]

> it's the seriously rich that have taken all of the spoils, that's where the massive imbalance is.

It depends on how you define “spoils.” People define it to include notional paper wealth, and I think that doesn’t reflect the actual mechanics of economic imbalance. On paper, NVIDIA’s shareholders have increased their wealth by $4.8 trillion in five years, enough to buy all the residential real estate in New York City and LA combined. But $5 trillion in notional AI wealth isn’t actually the same as owning NYC and LA. The paper wealth doesn’t affect the average person meaningfully until someone actually buys something with it.

Given that, it’s more useful to define “spoils” in terms of finite goods and services and look at spending on those goods and services. That is what directly affects the average person—it’s what makes housing or education or Disney tickets or whatever harder to access.

And on that front, the income growth of the top 10% has had a much more significant impact on the average person. The top 10% accounts for half of consumer spending today, up from 35% in the 1990s. And that spending is coming from the upper middle class, not billionaires. Bezos might be worth a million times more than the average person, but he’s not buying a million times more housing or Disney tickets or hotel rooms. Instead, the average person is competing directly with the increasingly affluent top 10% for access to those finite resources.

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didibus 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The bigger issue is weak competition. When a few companies dominate a market, they can raise prices, suppress wages, and capture more of the gains from economic growth.

That is also a big part of why wealth has become so concentrated at the top. If there were ten real cloud competitors, eight GPU makers, or several serious Office competitors, those companies would have a much harder time keeping such a large share of the profit. Instead, concentrated markets create enormous profits, and concentrated ownership turns those profits into enormous fortunes.

In my opinion, that has a bigger impact on the bottom 90%, and even on the upper middle 10% you are talking about, than the direct consumption of the top 10% ever could. It would be much better to raise the purchasing power of the bottom 90% than to reduce the consumption of the top 10%.

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hattmall 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is really a point that I think goes so misunderstood by so many. Yes billionaire's are bad, but people making 3x the median have a much bigger impact on those making median or less.

	▲	didibus 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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HumblyTossed 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If we tax the proceeds of AI generated productivity sufficiently

That's not going to happen.

	▲	WeMustSaveEarth 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		What about like a PNG tax for transparent pixels? Transparent pixels harm the environment because they use energy and don't even do anything
	▲	5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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variadix 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it’s possible AI job disruption (or the threat thereof) could lead to a new labor movement capable of uniting people across the isle. It remains to be seen, but I think if the threat of a “permanent underclass” isn’t enough to get people to compromise and cooperate, nothing will.

	▲	rayiner 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		People need to update their priors. The “permanent underclass” concern arose from a time when people thought AI was going to dominated by the first company to achieve it. But now we see that AI is becoming commoditized faster than almost any technology in recent history. IBM and Microsoft had a monopoly on personal computing for decades. AI is becoming a commodity before any of the AI companies have even turned a profit. AI is going to be like electric motors. If you had a monopoly on electric motors you could control the world! But instead they’re commodity products mass manufactured around the world

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visarga 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Haven't you seen how ridiculously good robots have become?