Millions of people with no meaningful jobs, no monetary means to move ahead, no structure to their days? We know what happens already to people in these situations … look to the dirt poor areas of our country (not just urban centers, mind you) and extrapolate that out … it’s not good. At least in our current economy, the people in these areas have hope of improving their lot. Take away that hope?
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I’m a largely a capitalist (in properly regulated markets, capitalism enables the most efficient allocation of goods and resources). I don’t think Citizens United and Snyder promote effective regulation. Not addressing the current narrow and narrowing concentration of wealth and the elimination of hope (as @kelsmom points out) are not good ways to perpetuate the institution of capitalism or political stability. Of course, no one who matters has asked my opinion.
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Invest heavily in anything personal security related if your predictions come to pass. Look at the countries with a huge divide. Rich people live in gated communities, have chauffeurs who have passed several levels of “defensive driving” certification, have fortified safe rooms in their home. The last company I worked for included “Ransom insurance” as part of the benefit package in a bunch of countries, and “Evacuation/Extraction Services” from a somewhat larger group of countries.
Gonna be boom times for these security companies if the income divide in the US starts to resemble some of these other countries.
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@blossom, that kind of risk is real and tangible in other countries. In one now-safe country, a client had a bulletproof SUV. Another client in the same country was kidnapped in the 80s. In another country, my team members were driven to a meeting in military vehicles (we did not know that they were going to have the meeting in an unsafe area and I forbid my team from any other meetings there). In another, now mostly safe country, one of my clients use to send a driver with military (probably special forces) training.
I’ve been in gated communities in Caracas (pre-Chavez) and in Brazil, among other places. Some people in the US already live in gated communities, but probably not quite as protected. I have read about the US tech ultra-wealthy buying compounds in New Zealand.
I’m not quite as apocalyptic. My guess is that the US will respond (a little too late) to the changing income divide – not well but well enough to keep the revolution away from the gates but not enough to avoid some pretty awful politics. I can imagine things like capital controls, for example, to ensure that money earned in the US stays in the US.
I’ve been thinking about water as an investment theme. Now I’ll think about security as another. Very interesting.
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It doesn’t need to be apocalyptic to become a growing and profitable industry.
I cannot describe for you what Jewish institutions in my town are now paying for security. A safe place which has not had a violent anti-Semitic incident since the 1930’s. Nursery schools have three layers of security– off-duty police officers (and their contract states the length of their shift, how much they charge, etc.), armed private security, and volunteer trained security officers working in teams. And the volunteers aren’t free- they donate their time, but the organization pays for their training and certification, equipment and uniforms, etc.
And just as folks started to think that the price-tag was extreme- the incident in Detroit last week sort of proved the point. The only fatality was the armed gunman.
So there will be roll-ups of these mom and pop security outfits which have a few dozen 1099 contract workers out on jobs, and there will be profits to be made once one of them scales successfully.
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I read an article this morning that briefly addresses this struggle, calling it the need to “matter.” The author mentions how AI may affect a person’s sense of worth:
One thing that keeps me up at night is what AI is doing to this deep human need to matter that we all have. Tech entrepreneurs predict that within the next 10 years, humans may not be required for most tasks. What happens when we no longer have people depending on us, when we don’t have an opportunity to add value? We talk rightfully about universal basic income, getting those basic needs for food and shelter met, but we need more than that. We need to think about how humans are still going to matter.
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DH has been vibe coding an application recently. I thought this article that talks about how the ability to create software without needing a CS background covered some interesting points.
‘Vibe coding’ may offer insight into our AI future
Vibe coding is creating software with the assistance of AI — and specifically, creating software where you don’t necessarily understand the code that’s being produced.
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I think the central practices we develop when vibe coding — thinking creatively about what we want to make, composing and iterating on prompts, critically evaluating what is produced — are going to become central life practices. Maybe it’s less “vibe coding” and more “vibe everything.”
If the technologies that surround us will be able to do an almost limitless number of things for us, and we just have to know how to ask, then being able to imagine possibilities, express clearly what we want to see in the world, review what we create, and iterate, will be incredibly helpful capabilities for all of us to develop.
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Very interesting. A bit of a move away from where education has been going (emphasis on gaining hard skills like coding) and back to using our imagination/creativity.
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I was in an interesting discussion about college education and AI. Someone half-jokingly said that the Great Books cirriculum may be AI-proof. The more I think about it, she may be right.
Some of this has always been a part of computer science. I have likened computer languages as being critical to software engineering in the same sense that speaking English is critical to lawyers. If you show up in court, at least where I live, you hear the lawyers talk in English. However, they need to know quite a bit more. The “more” is the hard part. Algorithms and data structures and math have for a while mattered more than programming languages.
Regarding the shift to AI, I think that understanding the underlying math and algorithms and techniques is important. To me the thing that comes through the strongest is that people who can understand what AI / ML is actually doing, and can use it effectively, will be gaining in value and impact. This however is not easy stuff to fully understand. A very smart person who is good at math / quantitative stuff and who is just starting university now might want to think about this as an area to learn something about.
Unfortunately AI when it is good can be very, very good, but when it is bad it can be horrid. This is approximately a paraphrase of how a professor once described Newton’s method for finding the zero of a continuous function, but it seems to apply to AI also. Someone needs to verify that what AI is doing is actually good and appropriate, and this probably needs to be someone who has at least some clue regarding what AI is doing. I sort of doubt that “someone who knows what AI is doing” includes our elected politicians.
This does concern me. If a person has nothing to do, they will find something to do. A lot of this will be either productive or harmless, but for a few people it may be destructive. I do not think that it takes all that much destructive to pull a society apart.
A different weird thought just occurred to me. Years ago I read a book that pointed out that political power tends to follow military power. If I remember this correctly: At one point castles were the most important and powerful part of war. Kings ruled (or sometimes Queens), and intellectuals talked about the divine rights of royalty. Then gunpowder came along, knocked down walls, and whomever could put together a military ruled. Then industry was most powerful, and democracy became important because the workers in a factory were the most important military power (World War 2 was won by factories, including American factories that could not be bombed). This much is about as much as I remember from the book (or article?). However, it occurs to me that now in Ukraine drones are becoming militarily important. Who can build the drones? Who can build the AI that runs the drones? This is not a skill that is equally spread among all of us. I am wondering if this will have an impact on a historic level. However, transitions from one center of power to another do not tend to be peaceful.
We might be living in interesting times.
I will try to find the book (if it is still sitting in my old piles of reading material). It may take me a while to re-read it.
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Interesting story this weekend about a guy who built a $1.8B revenue (so far) company in a short amount of time using AI. Minimal investment ($20K). He uses AI to do many of the operational tasks as well, which allowed this guy to be the only employee for a long time. His brother now works there, along with a handful of contractors who have defined tasks.
Gift link:
How A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8 Billion Company
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Here is Sam Altman/OpenAI’s thinking about the societal impacts of AI and what we should be doing as a society to deal with them.
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And here is a bit of a commentary on it from Pitchbook News.
| OpenAI has ideas on navigating our AI future—VCs should read the fine print |
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| (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) |
| By Jacob Robbins, Technology Reporter
In light of OpenAI’s expectation that AI superintelligence will profoundly reshape the world, the company released a 13-page industrial policy memo of its own ideas to tackle the coming transition.
For the VC world, some of these ideas would impact the flow of capital into AI companies, and potentially tilt the competitive playing field in favor of the biggest ones.
The memo calls for a compliance auditing framework to be applied to models before and after deployment. It would be targeted toward “a narrow set of highly capable models” that it describes as capable of advancing nuclear, biological and cyber risks.
Notably, OpenAI suggests the framework be developed in close coordination with national security agencies—at least one of which is currently embroiled in a legal battle with one of its competitors.
While OpenAI cautions its standards should “avoid creating unnecessary compliance burdens for small companies,” its suggestion for domain-specific regulation could indeed create such a burden for competitors focused on niche areas. Biosecurity, drug discovery and autonomous cybersecurity are three of the most actively funded niches in AI venture right now—and three areas the proposal explicitly flags as high-consequence.
OpenAI’s proposal also aims to help workers launch companies by using AI to handle the overhead that typically blocks entrepreneurship, paired with microgrants in a new initiative it calls “startup-in-a-box.”
OpenAI’s framing of this idea is focused on inclusion, but the implication is more pointed.
Early-stage investors have long pitched themselves as providing more than just capital, helping first-time founders with operational scaffolding. OpenAI is taking it in a new direction: using AI to spin up companies and grow fast. It could be a veritable alternative for entrepreneurs who don’t want to board the VC train.
OpenAI’s proposal also calls for essentially a sovereign wealth fund, a government investment vehicle that would take stakes in AI companies and distribute returns to citizens.
| Sovereign wealth funds are already investing historic amounts of capital into AI, accounting for roughly 31% of global AI deal value. The US has already toyed with the idea of setting up a fund, with President Donald Trump directing his administration to start developing its creation. A domestic public fund investing in AI companies would also directly compete with US venture funds. |
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This is a great illustration of what worries me - a great idea can be executed with extremely limited human capital. What that means (to me) is that while new industries will crop up to replace older ones, they won’t employ many people. So, as old jobs disappear new ones aren’t going to replace them at the same scale.
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No one fears what he has created more than Sam Altman himself. In an interview following the release of ChatGPT-5 last year, where Altman said he “got scared” while testing a version of his AI, he also noted:
“There are moments in the history of science, where you have a group of scientists look at their creation and just say, you know: ‘What have we done?”
The Altman/OpenAI article @shawbridge linked above is long, but worth the read. It starts by saying of this impending transition to superintelligence:
At OpenAI, we believe we should navigate it through a democratic process that gives people real power to shape the AI future they want and prepare for a range of possible outcomes while building the capacity to adapt.
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While we strongly believe that AI’s benefits will far outweigh its challenges, we are clear-eyed about the risks—of jobs and entire industries being disrupted; bad actors misusing the technology; misaligned systems evading human control; governments or institutions deploying AI in ways that undermine democratic values; and power and wealth becoming more concentrated instead of more widely shared. Indeed, we highlight these risks here to raise awareness of the need for policy solutions to address them. Unless policy keeps pace with technological change, the institutions and safety nets needed to navigate this transition could fall behind. Ensuring that AI expands access, agency, and opportunity is a central challenge as we move towards superintelligence. We should aim for a future where superintelligence benefits everyone
From a rather utopian slant, the article proposes some interesting policy initiatives, such as:
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Public Wealth Fund
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Efficiency dividends
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Adaptive safety nets that work for everyone
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Portable benefits
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Pathways into human-centered work
Whether or not any of these are even feasible, they represent the conversations we must have and the need for policy solutions we must begin to shape and implement now.
I read the article and found it both interesting and frightening. Public policy moves at a snail’s pace in this country and while I found a lot of Altman’s policy prescriptions worthy, many of them would get significant push back from Republicans in Congress. I fear the technology is going to outpace our ability to make the necessary policy initiatives that will soften the landing for people that are going to be affected. I think mainly of my two boys as my husband and I are on the brink of a comfortable retirement. They are soon to be thrust into a work world that is going to be far from welcoming.
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Totally agree, but we can’t just put our heads in the sand or say it’s already too late. We need to work toward making meaningful progress toward rational and effective policies that ensure our children aren’t facing a dystopian future, and I think the article poses some worthy ideas. But, I agree that there will be populations of people who suffer in the gap between the time serious AI disruption occurs and the time we enact appropriate measures to effectively counteract that disruption.
I wish more people thought like you and I do. So far, quite a few people I know are a little bit in denial - they think they and their kids won’t be affected or that the risks of AI are overblown. I am just the opposite - I think it’s going to be more disruptive than we think and that it will happen quicker than we think as well.
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I agree with you but, more importantly, our son agrees with you from his perch in national security, and he’s one of those who stand to benefit in the new world order. I’ve posted before that his belief in a dystopian future based on a combination of AI and climate change has influenced his decision not to have children. He is not as concerned about superpower posturing or nuclear war as he is his certainty that our doom is already sealed by the combined effects of automation/AI disenfranchising an entire population and spawning an unsustainably growing underclass and the escalation of climate change crises that will drive us to resource wars. He knows he is privileged and that he would be able to provide for a family while he is alive, but his timeline for when he believes these events will degrade the quality of life on the planet for all overlaps his children’s lifetime so, responsibly, no go.
As they say, “Denial is a river in Egypt.”
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If it hasn’t happened yet, I don’t think you can say they are in denial. Time will tell who will be affected or whether the risks of AI are overblown. If by “risks” you mean “doom is already sealed by the combined effects of automation/AI disenfranchising an entire population and spawning an unsustainably growing underclass” and more generally negative effects on the overall economy such as mass unemployment, I’d agree that the risks are likely being overblown by many. I think a more likely outcome is more comparable to other major industrial or technological advancements, which involved job displacement, rather than negative effects on the economy as whole.
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