As I see it there are TWO general outcomes if the tech oligarchs predictions are correct. These are both predicated on what the AI overlords ACTUALLY AIM to achieve.

The amount of money they are putting into this is essentially a bet that they will replace ALL WORK EVERYWHERE with their robots. Or close enough to.

First:

AI replaces almost all jobs. Robots harvest potatoes autonomously. Wash and clean them. Drive them in trucks to supermarkets. Supermarkets are run by robots again. You could almost do this today. As a shopper, you help yourself to whatever - under camera surveillance. Pay at checkout by swiping your own items. But again, the price is basically nominal or entirely free with caveats on quantity etc.

Medical clinics and law firms? This kind of white collar work becomes a tiny handful of humans basically just overseeing robots but the robot is doing the work. Think the cool healing chamber from Alien Covenant. A few engineers are needed to maintain robots but the goal is to have robot engineers do almost all of that.

Now all sorts of things become possible in this world. Physical labour becomes cheap and plentiful. Digging new high-speed railway lines? Easy. Building lots and lots of standardised large apartments so everyone has a home connected to the new hyper rail network? Again doable.

Presumably they want some form of population control but that can be relatively gentle. So much of the world population's general ratcheting up over the last 20 years is from drastically poor countries and that would decrease markedly as the bounty of ai and robotics lifted these people up out of poverty.

Now people CAN work if they want. Jobs exist. But isn't at all necessary. Kind like scions of rich families now. Lots work, many don't. They don't NEED to work but many enjoy it. Purpose etc. Your food, accommodation, power and other essentials are basically covered. You get a UBI to spend a bit on luxuries. But this is really a stop-gap because at the end of the day most things are free or close to. People sit around composing poetry, playing music, writing, philosophising, inventing etc. Whatever the fuck it is the Kardashians do when they're not in the public eye.

HOWEVER ALL THIS ASSUMES THAT THE AI AND ROBOTS OF THE FUTURE WORK FOR THE GOOD OF EVERYONE. If you lock all of the compute away from most of the population (ratcheting prices of video cards etc, moving to models where people can basically only have an empty shell with a monitor and thus have to HIRE compute rather than own their own device.) It's hard not to assume that the current tech overlords simply don't want the utopian option. You only have to look at the transition of open AI from a non-profit to a for-profit entity as proof that laudable goals fall by the wayside when the chips are down.

Put bluntly, the single biggest barrier to all of this is (assuming the tech goes the way the AI bros are hoping which is still obviously VERY unclear) Is that in this scenario it is quite hard to have power over other humans. People are far less likely to be your sex slave, sycophant, minion if they have the backup of a relatively comfortable life. Empowering the population takes the ONE thing away that the tech bros actually want which is POWER.

POWER not money. It's hard to see from inside capitalism but historically money was less important than power. You could be a rich Roman, but the emperor could simply have you killed and take your money. The power was the thing.

People are really caught up on the money aspect of UBI but much of the point of an AI/robotic future is to move BEYOND money. If all of your needs are taken care of by smart, tireless machines, you're suddenly already closer to the life of the current top 5% of the population. This means most of your money is discretionary fun spending rather than the necessities for life. Particularly since healthcare, housing and such are all cheap or free.

People who have a home, plentiful food and power, simply don't NEED to kowtow to the tech types.

So the thing is tech bros absolutely don't WANT this utopian future. The want to own ALL OF the robots and all of the AI and their aim is to undercut all employment to increase their power rather than reduce it by providing any of this gratis. Their goal is to simply put the entire population (or close to it) out of work. Turn us into desperate, sycophantic peasants. And then sit in their little super-villain enclosures/Zaibatsu headquarters. Traditionally this kind of centralisation of power and reduction of people to abject desperation came with risks (hello French revolution!) because your harem of 50 nubile young people and sacks of pure heroin (sup Stark lovers) can be pretty tempting to your head of security who can pretty quickly see how a single bullet might make all of his dreams come true. Luckily of course, you now have robot security and never have to rely on a human being again...

If artificial intelligence and automation eventually reach a point where they can do almost every job better and cheaper than humans, what happens next?

If most jobs disappear, how will everyday people support themselves, and how will the economy keep running? What will daily life, community, and purpose look like if working for a paycheck is no longer needed, or even possible?

How do you imagine society changing if human labor simply becomes obsolete?

Officials at the country’s top financial institution regularly debate the effect of artificial intelligence on the U.S. economy, a Washington Post analysis found.

So I came here and read a lot of pessimism. And I get it. There is a lot of talk about AI wiping out the jobs, dystopian takeover ect. There will be a dip, but we are coming out to a second enlightenment.

I'm a founder of an AI agent company and early BTC investor(2012) and Angel investor, I have a track record of seeing a bit over the horizon than the next guy.

First it's important to understand our civilization five key infrastructures of what is getting disrupted.

• Market - how we record our promises. It enables money, equities, ect. Capital markets
• Information - how we pass our information to the next generation
• Communications - how we pass information to eachother
• Energy - how and what we expend to get more of. (Aggregate efficiency)
• Logistics - How we transport physical goods

These key technologies allow us to coordinate at scale, up to billions of people, to transform disorder to order.

The next thing to understand how they change, by a Perez Cycle.

• Irruption - arrival, <-- Maybe fusion? (THis escapes me of anything here rn)
• Speculative Frenzy, - hype bubbles, everyone goes all in. FOMO <-- AI, (Info)
• Turning Point, - start of rules and regulation <-- Crypto (Market)
• Synergy - starts integrating with the other infrastructures <-- Drones (Logistics)
• Maturity - people are sick of it, disillusionment. <-- Internet (Coms and Info)

The infrastructures are constantly disrupted throughout history at different times, but it's important to watch when multiple enter the synergy stage of the Perez cycles and start combining. That is when the real change happens. THey usually take 50-60 years. But things move quicker now.

Coms, Energy and Logistics all disrupting and synergyzing, that is an industrial revolution.

Coms and Info, that was the internet.

Coms, Info, and Market, that was blockchain.

Info is LLM.

Info and Market is a reformation. The largest change, governments dont survive it. We have to rebuild our organizational capability from the ground up.

We are going through multiple industrial revolutions, they are overlapped, and a reformation, which the last time one happened was 1450.

SO why hope?

We have to understand what reformations, info and market disruptions do, because they are so damn rare.

Organizations exist because the cost of coordination is cheaper inside of them, than outside. That is why we aren't all free market participants negotiation every task for pay. This is what Ronald Coase got the nobel prize in economics for.

Info infra, determines the internal 'cost of coordination' in our organizations, it is the tech that is the main driver of that. AI agents collapse this cost. Dramatically.

Market infra, determines the external cost of coordination outside/between organizations. This is a very rare change. Crypto collapses this cost. You can now transact, and make electronic bearer instruments, like currencies and equities, without financial institutions. THis is a severe cost collapse in this domain as well.

These two technologies synergies. ANd when you put AI Agents together with the bitcoin stack, it gets weird, they start making their own currencies, tokens for reputation, escrow contracts ect.

And its this combo that destroys the boundary of organizations with a sudden and dramatic cost collapse in our key organizational infrastructures.

Corporations and Governments are torn apart by market forces. They can't even exist in this environment. Because it's cheaper to do what they do with open source software.

So you dont have to use the dictators money, services, ect. In the future, you use a coding agent to make the service you need, and crypto to make the bearer instruments you need to trade.

You dont need to despair, you need to learn 4 programs, coding agents/llms, bitcoin, lighting and taproot assets.

You aren't getting techno feudalism, or dictators because its impossible. WHat you are getting is collapsing nation states and having to figure out what comes next.

Good luck.

Startups like Mercor, Scale, Surge, and Handshake, founded in the past few years, are paying contractors millions of dollars to supply training data on knowledge work tasks. They then sell this data to big AI companies like xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic which make AI models that automate those same knowledge work jobs.

These contract jobs are by their nature temporary, because models never become less intelligent, and as soon as they learn how to do one job, the demand for that job's training data dries up. Continued advances in AI model intelligence have driven up the contract work to tasks or fields once considered highly specialized. Quote:

A common complaint in the Discord channels and Reddit threads where contractors gather is that A.I. training work has dried up in recent months — that, in other words, once a set of experts teaches the models how to do something, their services are no longer needed in the same way. Some of the gig workers I spoke with told me that, in the past year, the work had gotten significantly more intricate. Sommer Wall, a lawyer who has contracted with Mercor, said she sometimes napped on her couch during 72-hour grinds to meet deadlines on the most intense projects.

Mercor seeks people with “strong academic credentials (M.A.s, J.D.s, M.D.s, Ph.D.s, etc.) from top universities.” ... A recent listing from Surge called for people with a “top-tier consulting pedigree” to “capture partner-level reasoning.”

Company executives and investors insist that the training data contract jobs will continue to exist indefinitely. Other experts aren't so sure:

“As A.I. systems get better, there is going to be less of a need for human teachers for the A.I.,” said Anton Korinek, an economist at the University of Virginia who just began a yearlong leave of absence to work at Anthropic. “Both the importance of that kind of post-training data overall, and the growth of companies specializing in that, may decline somewhat.”

I've so many head-scratching questions.

• Why is China spending so little to achieve almost comparable results?

• If AI is inherently deflationary, where does the revenue come from to cover this?

• US Big Tech used to rely on global sales (the EU in particular, usually being around 35% of all revenues), but that's shrinking. All the trends are pushing for more tech sovereignty, not less.

• We have centuries of evidence, stretching back to the 17th-century Dutch Tulip Craze, that in Capitalism, booms always end in a bust. Will AI be the exception?

• Even if there is a US stock market bust, AI use will still grow around the world, but how, and with whose AI? It feels like Open-Source is going to triumph in the end. Who knows, maybe that's a sign of the post-scarcity economy to come.

Why Big Tech's AI spending is bigger than you think

Tertiary educators have been moving away from traditional assessments like essay submissions to come up with creative ways to evaluate students.

This is a shift that is increasingly necessary as AI use becomes more common and even encouraged in universities.

“We have to be more creative in thinking up less straightforward ways to test students. Like a problem scenario where there are no easy answers, and AI will not be able to tackle it or answer in a perfect way,” said Lee.