[<< | Prev | Index | Next | >>] Thursday, February 12, 2026
This Time is Different
A friend posted AI isn't coming for your future. Fear is. today and this was my quick reply (not well edited for clarity but hopefully the main points come across):
Alas, I have to disagree and side with the Luddites here. He's not making an important distinction: between the economy as a whole (which is always growing exponentially, more or less) and dispersion of wealth. Technology's function is, and always has been, to enable smaller numbers of people to control more capital. Technological advancement throughout history thus simultaneously aids the exponential trajectory of economic growth, AND the exponential trajectory of the dispersion of wealth: The power differential between the richest few and the poorest masses has only steadily increased through every transition he mentions. (He also isn't accounting for population growth in many of his stats -- there's "more" XYZ job now than then but... not per-capita.)
The thing that's made this tolerable is that the whole machine has still ultimately fed on human labor: you need to sell those new machine-made textiles to someone, in trade for something, and so the pyramid of wealth has been sort of auto-positioned to be as tall as possible without completely crushing the people on the bottom.
But there's a beam that's been rising, which is the level of ability below which you are no longer needed in the equation at all -- when, in effect, there is nothing you can do that can't be done cheaper and better by a machine. That is, there's a point at which the machine itself replaces you as the consumer, not just the producer.
The thing is, this beam has been moving swiftly and steadily since the dawn of technology, but it started out WAY below the human ability band. The jobs lost during previous industrial revolutions -- those were just the leading TAIL of the bell curve. They didn't take up much ability-space, just some specialized things, so people had to move over. And with an exponentially growing economy, there was plenty of room for it.
We hit the center of that bell curve at the singularity -- when AI matches human ability 1:1 -- and that will be the time of the most rapid job/meaning/value loss for humans, on a scale categorically unlike anything that ever came before: Center of the bell curve, vs. tails. Not the same thing.
The trailing tail of that bell curve belongs to the last vestiges of uniquely human abilities: The first profession will also be the last. (Prostitution, and other such incidental and sentimental human-performative acts like live music, etc, in service now of those who own the AIs.)
What the author is recognizing, rightly, is that today belongs to the top few percent in terms of ambition and existing wealth (most of the big power accumulation due to AI is not for creativity, ambition, or intelligence, but simply for having the capital to invest in AI). At the low end that's the people with a high enough IQ and ambition AND (rare) enough financial security to have the time to invest in grabbing the tail of the beast before it gets away completely.
What he recognizes is that he's on the front side of the bifurcation point -- he's still above the beam.
But he fails to recognize that the beam is squarely in the human ability band now, and still moving fast, and that it will pass him by "soon" (whether that's 5 years or 20 I don't know, but doubtfully much more than that).
And then the equation completely changes from the past, because it is no longer: What new job has this technology created than didn't exist before? But rather: What can I do better than a machine that is better than me at everything but being made of meat?
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