Hacker News Reader

Comment by crop_rotation | Hacker News Reader

What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more and more people will have to compete with the fewer and fewer social climbing opportunities.

Also what happens to Europe? All these companies behind LLMs are from US, and Europe is nowhere to be found. This seems like it will dramatically accelerate the wealth different between the US and the EU.

View on HN

Focussing on the climbing is the core problem I think. Why even do this? We collectlively should own the machines and guarantee just wealth distribution, so that its impossible for a few to have much more than than others. Then every increase in machine work is a great thing for everyone, instead of increasing competition between fewer and fewer people.

Europe in itself is (together) the single biggest market/economy in the world by the way, and the US is actually falling behind into developing-country territory when you look at the population and their access to basic services. And just because right now it is convenient to rely on the US companies, and we're deep allies btw, doesn't mean europeans couldn't spin up the same tech if really needed.

Luddites failed the first time around. What could they do this time to succeed?

french revolution and socialist revolutions went different. its not preventing the machines, its strictly solving the problem of who owns them - fairly easy thing. It "only" needs to build up a bit more suffering for the masses until this naturally happens again.

The thing is then the people in power were reliant on other people to provide force. What happens when the tech-overlords and government cliques put their hands on perfect robot AI slaves which are completely superior to humans when it comes to fighting?

Kill bot enforced gated communities and a free for all outside, naturally. Maybe in due time we have a second industrial revolution and rebuild modern society ourselves...

I think with the advanced level of weaponry we (will) have, the is no thing like a truly gated community no matter the bots.

And given the amount of time needed to actually build this against the current pace of AI progress, the angry mob should materialize itself much earlier. French Nobles didn’t see the Guillotine coming either, even like a day before the revolution

The first time around (and every subsequent time) the tools used for production, lets call them capital, made laborers more efficient and cheapened goods and drove wages up (mostly). In all of these cases there was still the need for a laborer.

At a point when all labor is obsolete there will be literally no method of survival for anyone who doesn't own the "compute capital". The two options will be to let everyone starve because they weren't lucky enough to shareholders in the company that owns all the bots, or just make that enterprise socially-owned and pay the unemployed workers.

> At a point when all labor is obsolete there will be literally no method of survival for anyone who doesn't own the "compute capital".

How about subsistence farming?

Maybe, but they still need a different type of capital. Unless property rights stop being enforced, where are all the people who don’t own land, or people who don’t own arable land supposed to farm? Are we bringing back manorialism?

Considering I am mostly obliged to rent land where I can perform work so I can use my salary to pay my rent just makes me feel like I live in some sort of distributed virtual manor to be honest.

I supposed if the gracious techno-overlords are gracious enough to grant the underclass a nature preserve where they can keep living in a labor-powered society then sure. Somehow I feel that bulldozing ghettos would be the more realistic outcome.

Truthfully I think we'd have a few large societal shifts before we ever got to the stage where genius level AI could be spun up and down like containers, but it helps to illustrate the point that a post-labor society is incompatible with the tenets of capitalism, which is something that a lot of people fail to comprehend when they worry about AI.

Isn’t that what the gig economy is basically already?

Laborers are not fungible you know. There is plenty of evidence of lives ruined by industrial change.

The fact that the net result is positive doesn't mean that everyone profits equally. Having lived in capitalistic societies should have made that clear already.

I never said that it was. I just explained why this time was different. Innovation always hurts people but it benefits enough people that there's not massive social unrest. I am not making a moral assertion here just pointing out the qualitative difference.

We’ve had the means and technology to provide even food/housing/education for the entire world, for a long time.

Yet here we are.

It’s a human-political issue, it is not a technology issue.

What’s the difference now?

You're describing a dystopia.

>We collectlively should own the machines and guarantee just wealth distribution, so that its impossible for a few to have much more than than others.

OK, put your money where your mouth is and send me 10% of your pay check.

OK, put your money where your mouth is and stop paying taxes

You wanna tell me how you got from not wanting socialism to not paying taxes? Or do you think taxation is socialism?

And while we are here obviously I do my best to pay as little taxes as possible, but due to where I live I do end up paying more than 30% of my salary in taxes.

Are you gonna explain how you went from 'co-ownership and better wealth distribution' to 'ok then give me 10% of your paycheck'?

Socialism is splitting your shit. Learn your philosophy. This is like how students at my colleges "socialist party nights" always got angry when I took beers out of their fridge. That's literally what socialism is.

You're the only one raising the socialism strawman...

Did you ever put beers into those fridges? Or just took them? Because that's what looting is.

Socialism is literally looting people who have stuff and handing it out to others. I didn't have money nor beer and they were supposedly socialists, so I gave accordingly to my ability and took according to my needs.

I guess Socialism is always nicer when you see yourself on the receiving end. We are both in the top 1% of the world, so we'd be giving away pretty much all we have.

Did you offer to labor at the best of your skills for them? Did you need the beer? The comparison is risible.

You have no idea how I live to make claims about my political inclinations.

Then again I never advocated socialism, and you're fighting a shadow.

I’m not terribly worried. Though I assume my work will begin to resemble that of the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than proper engineering.

The fact is that anyone who understands even at a basic level what the computer is actually doing and isn’t afraid to look at it at a low level can’t be replaced by an AI trained on stack overflow.

It may be that I will spend more of my time on code review of LLM generated code, or make my money in the new kinds of legacy code created by copy pasting ChatGPT snippets together instead of SEO optimized stack overflow scrapes.

For me the outcome is the same. The skills I need to be more effective than the machine are the exact same as they were decade, century or even millennium ago. I still don’t see these LLMs do any synthesis of knowledge, and they don’t seem to have a grasp of logic or grammar at the level I expect a bright middle school student to have.

> Though I assume my work will begin to resemble that of the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than proper engineering.

Lol, I was thinking about this the other day. Eventually most devs will essentially just be praying to the Machine spirit to make the computer do what they want. A small few high clerics will bother to learn how computers actually work. The rest will simply be cargo culting to the maximum extent possible.

> Eventually most devs will essentially just be praying to the Machine spirit to make the computer do what they want.

Same as it ever was.

You should read the "Sparks of AGI" paper, especially the math and code sections. It's a GPT-4 evaluation conducted from outside OpenAI (authored by a MS team). It's an easy to read paper, mostly a collection of examples.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712

> What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world[?]

If the technology pans out the way the techno-enthusiasts hope it will, upward social mobility will be nearly eliminated... unless there's some kind of successful Luddite revolution against the technology and the people that own it. But that's not going to happen: there are all kinds of social pressure against revolution, as well as strict gun control in most places. Anyone who tries to resist their obsolescence will soon find themselves either ridiculed and condemned or in jail.

Of course, downward social mobility will accelerate, and be celebrated by idiot technologists who just want to build tech, and don't really care to think about the consequences of the technologies they build on real people.

I don't think social mobility will be eliminated, I think the variance of individual mobility will just be radically increased. This technology will allow entrepreneurs and solo content creators to accomplish a lot more, but it'll also eliminate a lot of safe career paths. As a result, if you don't want to be stuck in the underclass doing manual labor or customer service, you'll need to either be brilliant, well connected, start a business or create content of some sort that attracts an audience you can monetize. The people who do well will do very well, but a lot of people who would have done decently before are going to fail.

Your points all resonate with me. But the end result is same, the opportunities available for social mobility to an average person would reduce. I am not even sure of the 2nd and 3rd order effects. How would an industry like hospitality survive if most of the knowledge work based jobs are gone.

> I don't think social mobility will be eliminated, I think the variance of individual mobility will just be radically increased.

Those round to the same number: 0.

> The people who do well will do very well, but a lot of people who would have done decently before are going to fail.

How is this not a huge problem? The vast majority of people are not exceptional. Cutting out that middle band of ability and resources is a surefire recipe for social unrest.

>Cutting out that middle band of ability and resources is a surefire recipe for social unrest.

I don't know, the US has been pushing that envelope for 40+ years and people are still paying taxes...

> I don't know, the US has been pushing that envelope for 40+ years and people are still paying taxes...

And people can push the "meth consumption" envelope for years before they finally die from it, too.

Getting away with unsustainable practices for X amount of time doesn't prove they're sustainable and won't end in collapse. It just means collapse can take more than X amount of time.

Nothing is sustainable. This is a concept invented to thwart questioning the environmental impacts of industrial activity. "Oh we can do it 'sustainably'".

To claim AI tools will strip out the wealth of the middle class and cause unrest can be disproved by the fact that it was beaten to it by the US corporations by over a generation.

The "middle class" was an invention of post war US to reward the soldiers who fought in Europe and the Pacific. Things are just reverting to a more long (as in multiple centuries) trend behavior of economies. Few haves, lots of have-nots and barely anything in between.

We can only LARP as ubermensch alpha males for so long. Eventually something will give; I suspect it will be a generational divide like none other. Arguably you see the seeds of this already with things like incels opting out of conventional aspirations.

you vastly underestimate civilians. probably not a single gun is needed. a crowd of people at some point will walk into the billionaire's home and make him agree with handing over his wealth. They might call the police, but all thats needed is the officers ignoring the call willingly. Why should they defend those billionaires? What should they do? Rich people depend on many individual poor laborers, all of them can simply decide to no longer accept his state of affairs and there is lietrally nothing the billionaires could do against it.

Ideally, defund the police and so on, so that every state worker also is keen on getting that wealth redistribution done.

> you vastly underestimate civilians. probably not a single gun is needed. a crowd of people at some point will walk into the billionaire's home and make him agree with handing over his wealth.

I'm not underestimating civilians. If what you're suggesting was at all realistic, China would be a democracy and Trump would still be president.

Sure, tens of millions of unarmed people with a single mind could probably do anything (like a mass of zombies can), but you'll never actually get that. There are numerous mechanisms preventing such a mass from forming, and more to dismantle and negate it afterwards.

you assume that the vast majority of people in china are outright unhappy with their government right now, I don't think that this is the case. And trump is simply an idiot that only get enough votes somehow because both parties in the US are a joke to begin.

> you assume that the vast majority of people in china are outright unhappy with their government right now, I don't think that this is the case.

I'm not talking about right now.

> And trump is simply an idiot that only get enough votes somehow because both parties in the US are a joke to begin.

Trump literally had "a crowd of people at some point ... walk into the [government's] home and make [them] agree with handing over [power]." How did that go?

It's not that they don't think about the consequences, it's that, as useful idiots, they think they'll be protected from them. It will be delicious when reality finally dawns on them. They helped build the big club, and they didn't even get to be in it.

This is a question to ask when this actually becomes a reality. The AI taking jobs narrative is more of a marketing ploy to convince companies to buy AI services but the truth is, none of this stuff is anywhere near market ready. If a person is doing a job an AI bot can currently replace you've probably already replaced that person with cheap labor overseas. Regardless of whatever optimism is being channeled into the hype about AI's "potential", it hasn't convinced many businesses.

Businesses take time to react and this is recent. I'm close to Hollywood and these technologies are seeing their first value-generating uses on every project I'm privy to. What you see in public is just that-public.

> it hasn't convinced many businesses.

Those businesses would not be around for very long, so who cares?

Like what?

The panic is needless. If one hour of design work generates $100 income, then one might assume that MidJourney/Dall-E/StableDiffusion will generate trillions of dollars, but the world doesn't work like this. What will happen is that the design jobs will transform.

As you might have noticed, the AI boom will decimate the code writing jobs as well, something that the EU is behind on. Europe missed the "tech" age, but notice how the EU is not any poorer than the USA. Sure, some countries are poorer than others, but not everywhere in the US is Silicon Valley. Why? Because despite the EU missing out on "tech", actually the EU is very technologically advanced. Tech doesn't mean only low-touch high-scale computer-based businesses. There are chemists, biologists, anthropologists out there who don't know how to write a single line of JS and are paid like 1/5th of a junior JS developer, but the work they do is very valuable to society. Guess they don't need to learn JS anymore.

Also, notice how despite the thousands of layoffs, the US job data keeps coming out very positive - there's no unemployment problem. This is because of the markets, but AI will have similar effects. The world no longer needs that many CSS experts and React gurus who pull in $200K; the world apparently needs more hard-tech engineers and retail workers.

The AI thingy is devastating just for a subset of the "tech" workers and creative industries. It will enable other types of people and industries.

Startups who are trying to solve food production issues, for example, might finally outshine the next grocery delivery startup.

> but notice how the EU is not any poorer than the USA.

EU is significantly poorer than the US. Lots of different ways to measure it, but it’s a factor of roughly 1.5-2x in purchasing power parity.

It’s just accounting differences. The life in Europe is not any different. If the junior developers don’t make 100K and the visit to a doctor doesn’t cost 10K the overall economic activity appears to be lower but it’s not.

Just FYI for non-Americans...most Americans are insured and doctors visits don't cost 10k. Major surgeries might, but your insurance usually caps at a certain number in the 2-8k range for the whole year.

Not saying the system isn't bad, but 10k for a doctor's visit is kind of a stretch...

It doesn’t matter who pays for it, in the statistics it appears that an appendicitis generates much more economic activity in the USA than EU.

Healthcare spending per capita in the USA is 12K, the second most expensive is Germany and it’s 7K.

The life expectancy in Germany is 82 and in the USA is 77, so it’s not the case that Americans are getting much better one, explaining the higher costs.

Oh and that appendicitis? It kills much more Americans than Germans(0.08 vs 0.06 per 100K).

All your points I agree with. I didn't say it was a good system. I've lived in Japan and I loved the government health insurance. One of my biggest annoyances about being back in the US is how I get my insurance through my job, so now every time I hop jobs I have to do the stupid math and figure out the new employer's health crap.

I'm just saying that I see these weird takes about Americans paying like 10k for a single visit when that's just not the reality for most people. Only 8.6% of Americans were uninsured in 2020. Most insurance plans have a cap that doesn't even allow you to pay more than like 2-10k in an entire year.

Is it more expensive? Duh. It's just that there's more nuance to the issue. If I wasn't American (or I was an American that didn't understand how insurance actually works) I might have read that and believed that the poor Americans are all living in hell.

So yeah...we can talk about the issue because it's a big deal. In fact, I think it's the #1 biggest problem with American society right now and it's maddening that I never see anyone focusing on it. However, I don't like to see this kind of hyperbole from OP because people turn their brains off and stop looking at the facts.

is not accounting differences at all: - Europeans (and I am one) live in tiny housing even compared to people in NYC. - we have less cars (you can claim it's due to public transport but if public transport is not available most people would not afford cars regardless. - overall less leisure expenditures and less disposable income.

That 10k doctor is a myth and certainly not something the 100k developer will have to pay. That's covered by his company. Healthcare is an issue in US when you're at the bottom of the food chain.

How many New York’s are there in the USA? Maybe NY is not the average American experience?

I don't think this invalidates the parent's point though.

I'm just waiting for an "Ask HN: What are some job alternatives for people who know programming and can't get a job anymore since ChatGPT replaced us?"

The problem is that many when saying "EU" are thinking mainly Germany and other countries among the top-3/5. But even Germany is behind the US in terms of GDP/capita, PPP probably also.

Most of the US is behind the leader locations as well. And most Europeans in rich metropolises have better lives then Americans in rich metropolises. Less pollution, less traffic, more free time, more safety.

What does GPT know beyond what we have (directly or indirectly) taught it? Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Would it have invented the MPG format (or something comparable) on its own? Would it have developed the web and HTTP protocol on top of TCP/IP?

And so on. Maybe the answer is in fact "yes", or even "yes, and it would have done these things even better than humans did". But so far it seems to be amazingly good at doing things that we showed it how to do.

If we stop creating actually new things, will it do that for us also?

Why would it care to do so? What interest does it have in creating new things on its own?

The amount of people who create genuinely new things is so tiny that I am not sure it is even relevant to the discussion. And here I mean genuinely new things, not translating some C lib to java or similar stuff, or changing existing libraries to handle more stuff.

If the amount of people that will have social mobility opportunities will be equivalent to the amount of people who could have invented the MPG format or something comparable, then my point is made.

> people who create genuinely new things is so tiny

This is my insurance against LLMs, only works if the market demands new things...

I doubt anyone would want their livelihood to depend upon being able to create genuinely new things with extreme consistency.

> The amount of people who create genuinely new things

The question isn't really about "genuinely new things". The number of permutations of existing things is such that at any given job you're likely to do old things in a new way.

E.g. you'd think that all streaming services are the same. Superficially, yes. Internally, Netflix, Disney+ and Apple Tv+ are likely to be different as night and day.

>Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it?

Could you?

A good highlight to an ambiguous question! Which knowledge, exactly, is not being made available?

But let's say that an MPG format specification is available. Even other code examples of interacting with an MPG file. But no examples, no library, no documentation on specifically how to extract a subset of one file into another file.

I would think a competent programmer could figure that out. Perhaps an AI tool could also; I have not yet seen an example of it doing so, but perhaps it could.

Of the handful of questions I asked, this might be the least interesting one. More generally, can AI tools advance the state of the art?

> What does GPT know beyond what we have (directly or indirectly) taught it? Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Would it have invented the MPG format (or something comparable) on its own? Would it have developed the web and HTTP protocol on top of TCP/IP?

Would you?

Ironically administration overhead in many industries, particularly healthcare and education, has been growing over the past several decades despite increasing technology adoption.

This is exactly the opposite of what you would expect given the increased efficiencies that come from adopting computer systems and automation.

I see AI as a continuation of this trend and I don’t expect it to put people out of work, bureaucracy will always find new ways to justify itself.

I’ve heard this stated as “jobs that don’t exist for economic reasons aren’t going to get automated for economic reasons”.

I think we overestimate the extent to which organizations are aligned and making cohesive decisions based on economics.

The other thing is that we'd need insane levels of trust in the AI to have it doing all these jobs 100%.

Like, I could technically have a newbie running commands on a production router for a script that I wrote out...but even if I let them do that there's no way I wouldn't at least supervise. I don't think most companies are even remotely comfortable with the idea of having an AI system running code on their systems no matter how smart it is.

You hit the nail on the head. GPT/copilot in some sense is democratization of specialized knowledge. Now on one end you'll have product engineers/managers prompt gpt to write boilerplate code of all kind, on the other end you'll have senior engineers reviewing, optimizing writing specialized code. Where do junior engineers fit? Can you be a full stack engineer? I believe it'll squeeze out all the could-be devs out of the field forever. Gender diversity/DEI? Forget it. Upward mobility? Will become much harder, you'll basically need to have a specialization to even be considered

And then your senior engineer class ages out and you are left with who? You need a ladder to create that senior class in the first place.

At that point I'm pretty sure they'll already have fine tuned a "senior software engineer agent". This may sound ridiculous and yeah we probably won't get rid of the entirety of SWE ladder, but my point is we are entering the realm of science fiction now, our assumptions about labor are about to fall off a cliff. Productivity will increase through the roof, corps will make more cash, workers will suffer

I mean when enough people are unemployed they will just vote to socialize the society. Also, massive deflation will reset the global economy. The social ladder as you call it will flatten pretty hard. At that point we nationalize and ubi with work being some kind of minimum amount a year to qualify for ubi. Work hours per year will drop alot. I think society will transform for the better where we start developing towards a post scarcity deflationary future rather than the inflationary rat race we have now.

As AI progresses, job options will reduce to various flavors of people who tell AI what to do, or tell other people what to do, or do physical things that machines are bad at. Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts, social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer service. The entire "middle" portion of most organizations that exist to connect the people making the high level decisions wit h the boots on the ground is going to disappear.

> Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts, social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer service.

And at the very end, it will reduce to capital only, with no need for labor at all. Most people will be unemployed, and whatever capital they've amassed is unlikely to be enough to sustain themselves and their families for the long term. They (you) will end up as little more as impotent ants to AI-fueled Elon Musks, neglected until the infestation needs to be cleared to make way for some project.

While that's technically a valid potential future, it's unrealistic just because society would tear itself apart long before it reached that limit state.

> While that's technically a valid potential future, it's unrealistic just because society would tear itself apart long before it reached that limit state.

I don't think it's that unrealistic. The trick will be, not going too fast, managing a few separate transitions, and making sure capital maintains control of the institutions with the monopoly on the use of force. The masses don't tend to act to project their interests until it's too late.

> The masses don't tend to act to project their interests until it's too late.

The masses are already showing signs of restlessness, and the only real problem right now is wealth inequality. Actual unemployment rates remain low. Forward in time a little, let's say 20% unemployment due to AI. The only way anybody is going to maintain their monopoly on use of force is if they hire every one of those 20% to be police. Right now the ratio of police to citizens is really low, and the ratio of weapons to civilians really high. I don't think the masses will wait all that long.

>> The masses don't tend to act to project their interests until it's too late.

> The masses are already showing signs of restlessness

IMHO, "restlessness" doesn't mean anything. It would be expected in a AI-driven usurpation of labor. People have already been restless for decades due to de-industrialization, and that mainly got us Trump and an opioids, but the factories are still gone.

The key to fucking over the masses is making sure the "restlessness" doesn't get too strong, and doesn't have a clear (and correct!) villain identified, and maintaining a sense of inevitability.

> I don't think the masses will wait all that long.

IMHO, they probably will. Any individual or small group who takes action will be pilloried as wackos and thrown in jail. A larger movement will be (rightly) characterized as an insurrection and dealt with harshly.

People are complacent, and often don't realize they're really losing something until it's already slipped from their fingers.

I also think the Western world lacks the ideological tools to stop technologies like this. They'd basically have to start looking at technology like Amish do: rejecting technology that would undermine their social structure, rather than expecting the social structure to adapt to the technology.

Under a capitalist system hell bent on endless and unfettered growth there's no slowing down. All it's going to take is a handful of players across a handful of industries to set things in motion. Perhaps AI will inadvertently eat the rich.

The end state is when the cost of goods is determined by externalities. Capital and labor costs will be minimal; what you pay for is the pollution produced in the manufacture of the goods.

We may not be that far away from when energy-intensive, latency-insensitive computing tasks are best located in space, to take advantage of cheap continuous solar power. The power capabilities of the next gen Starlink satellites are impressively cheap.

It doesn't really make sense though does it? Musk is rich because people buy his cars. If we're all impoverished ants, no one is going to be buying cars. Musk's money has to come from somewhere.

> It doesn't really make sense though does it? Musk is rich because people buy his cars. If we're all impoverished ants, no one is going to be buying cars. Musk's money has to come from somewhere.

It does make sense, but you're not thinking about it clearly because you're too tied up in existing social structures. The end state "AI-fueled Elon Musks" (note that's a type, not a particular man) don't need common-man customers or their money, because they don't need to pay labor to operate their capital. They can directly operate their capital themselves, so they'll just do whatever the heck they want and nearly everyone who's now an employee becomes an ant.

At that point the main economy would mainly consist of billionaire ego projects and some trade between large corporations to support them. Common people would scrape by on billionaire largess and by squatting on resources not currently needed by billionaire ego projects and using it for small-scale subsistence production.

Thanks for explaining that. It's terrifying.

Hot take: we will get better software.

People who are in tech just to "climb social ladder" i.e. only for the pay check are going to be pushed out by LLMs and people who are actually passionate about tech will remain. This will cause less and less shitty code to be written (of course for next few years even more bloated shit code will be written with ChatGPT and Copilot by noobs who have no idea what they are doing)

Nobody in their right mind would start a business like this in Europe, with the shadow of the EU threatening with regulating everything and pushing taxes/fines for everything. Just move to a tech hotspot in the US.

Social mobility is already a joke. Knowledge workers have enjoyed prosperity for decades, software folks in particular, all AI does is even the playing field a bit more.

What you're describing requires AI to make conjectures, hypothesize, design experiments, run them, and assess their results.

Lol I am from Europe and I know how to repro this in a week so not a big deal.

The Luddites were not protesting technology because technology is inherently evil. They were against the capitalistic ownership of the means of production.

So far technology has enabled use to increase economic output which means rising standards of living. Even if 99% of people subsist from selling their labor, the tools they use are a force multiplier that (in theory) drives wages up.

When you can spin up a bunch of Von Neumann level intelligence LLM-powered agents and have them run your company for you, there is no more labor to sell. You can either pay the former laborers to exist, or just let them starve.

So our two options are social ownership of all AI capital, or letting everyone without AI capital die, and let a handful of people live in the resulting AI-powered society.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com