We often look back on earlier stages in world history like we're somehow more advanced, or inherently smarter, than past societies. But one of the things made clear by the way this problem lines up perfectly with conflict during the industrial revolution (including the innovators flagrantly violating the law in order to win their advantage) is that for all our technological sophistication, we haven't really gotten better at the hard, human things: social coordination, planning, democracy. (Perhaps that's because we're still living under the same system that the industrial revolution finally birthed.)

I do think there is a good chance that, in the not-so-distant future, universal basic income will become the norm. In previous industrial revolutions, large numbers of jobs were created to offset those that were lost. But there are very few things AI cannot perform faster and cheaper. Best case scenario, we will be in a world with both high productivity and high unemployment. Governments may have no choice but to provide universal income to everyone.

How much actual money do you think the “people with billions of dollars” have in comparison to the needs of the population as a whole? I think you’re very confused about where the actual income in the economy goes.

>consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies

Make lobbying illegal, I don't understand why it's normalized.

America isn’t the only country on earth, it’s just one of hundreds of others. That alone makes me confident about future not being even 1/10 as gloomy as some people think.

We have a lattice of diverse legal and economic systems in the world and it takes just a single one to figure out the solution for others to learn from.

> consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies who know the domain best and are agitating for better financial and social safeguards for all.

To hear Marc Andreessen tell it, the US tech industry's rightward turn in the 2024 campaign was specifically intended to head off any attempt to regulate AI [0]. So the blame rebounds to tech CEOs even if you believe that only the government should take a holistic view of a given technology's impact.

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-06-11/marc-andr...

The distinction matters.

For example, the people fighting inequality can use AI to their advantage, and focus criticism on billionaires (and general bad AI usage, like slop PRs) instead of ordinary AI users.

> Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money…

Or until actual people take the billions of dollars sitting behind those weak man-children. The US has fewer than 1000 billionaires now, and more than 300,000,000 people. That seems like a solvable problem.