alt Hacker NewsBut what's the point of real assets if you can't do anything with them? No point in holding real estate if nobody can afford to rent/buy your houses or go do whatever money-spending thing you put on your commercial lots.
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The plutonomy transition is well under way. The sardinian seafront villa will likely retain and gain value as the early anthropic employee might like it, while the house in some flyover state might not find any buyers.
The economy of the future will be about yachts, supercars, hermes bags, private air travel and ozempic. Not about how you made it possible for everyone to watch a gigantic library of videos for free, or how you made cars affordable for everyone.
That sounds like a Q4 problem.
It's speculation and high scores. Rich people trade houses to each other and see who has the most houses. It doesn't matter if the roof caved in, except insofar as that makes the house less impressive to the rich next to you.
Robots will use real estate as rain shelter after the human occupants have starved to death.
The tenants might change in the future. Right now they are individuals, but perhaps properties will be leased to build power grids or autonomous logistics warehouses. Also, if techno-feudalism accelerates and public purchasing power collapses, leading to the introduction of UBI, I think most of that money will just end up going toward essential housing costs anyway. In fact, if you look at recent trends in real estate, commercial properties are where the big money is being made, aren't they?
Real assets have utility of their own (i.e. a house to live in, commodity to build, etc). Money only exists to incentivize human economic actors to bother working, to relative price resources against each other and for governments to use as a tool - it isn't wealth on the aggregate scale.
AI invalidates a lot of the need for money to even exist as a concept anyway in some scenarios. If only a few people have all the stuff (huge inequality) you don't really need a large money system because you no longer need most people to get what you want (i.e. most are economically irrelevant). You have a magical genie called AI instead that can transform what you have into what you want as long as you have the raw materials, space and energy. The wealthy could then negotiate in large transactions via barter - I trade that plot of land for that copper mine. Most large transactions are negotiated in any case.
A very likely case (there are others) is that AI enables feudalism of some sort to come back - where the new lords are the owners of the other economic factors of production that remain scarce (capital, land, resources, social) - not intelligence and/or labor. This is the opposite of a meritocratic society. It would explain why people want to win the AI race; and are willing to burn uneconomic amounts of money to build it out. There is a race to the finish here.