Twelve people have the same negotiation leverage as half of humanity and you cannot see how that could possibly be conceived as alarming?
5,012 karma · joined March 3, 2026
Sure, but it goes both ways. Musk didn't need to take the chance to wreck government mechanisms that are supposed to be a check on his companies. Altman et al don't need to lecture world leaders at the G7, etc etc. All of those are active choices.
> This alone implies nothing. What matters is the floor. A world where there was almost no wealth disparity but everyone was poor would be awful, and a world where 5 people had 10 billion times more wealth than everyone else combined would be good if all those other people lived in amazing prosperity
This is where we disagree. Wealth isn't some objective number in isolation. Sure, getting everyone out of poverty is amazing and one has to commend societies that achieve that - most notable example here would be China over the past few decades.
But the key thing to understand here is that wealth is a social relation, not some sort of pure material thing. If you were the only person on the planet, technically I guess you would own it all, but I'm sure you understand that statement would be meaningless. What makes wealth interesting is that it is formalized power over.
It's what makes the cleaner clean the well-off persons toilet because they wouldn't be able to afford food otherwise. It's how the middle aged white guy gets to sleep with the young Thai girl because she's worried about her mother's medical bills.
I would posit that that social relation is the injustice that requires solving once a base of material comfort is met. Raising the floor isn't enough. Removing the twisted power games is the only way to have a society that isn't deeply extractive and counter to human dignity.
Similarly, think about the example you've given with the 5 billionaires and everyone else pretty well off. What could those five make the rest do? Can they use their own resources to make somebody else not-well-off? If so, what does that say about the power structures of the society they live in? What does that mean for freedom, for self-actualization?
I think you're falling for the STEM-oriented trap of seeing everything through an overly literal reductive lens. Yes, of course Altman and his ilk don't literally have a deed saying "50.0001% of the US" on it framed up on their wall.
But they control the ruling institutions - see the way they act in unison with the American regime, see them sitting alongside leaders of state at the G7 summit [0], see his colleague Musk being invited to purge the government with DOGE.
Power and ownership isn't always quite so clear, especially in increasingly authoritarian systems. As another example, think of Putin - officially he's just a simple government employee drawing a modest salary. But you might agree with me that there's a bit more than that under the surface.
However, even in a literalist reading, the trends are obvious and alarming: Twelve people own more of the world's wealth than the bottom 50% of the population (!). [1]
> I agree that the political question around immigration to the US or other western countries isn't directly related to how people should think about Sam Altman
And yet, the conversation almost immediately got deflected to immigration, because staying on topic - Altman's impunity - would've been an ideologically difficult fact to examine.
That is my point and the mechanism I think is worthy of further investigation.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/17/anthropic-amodei-google-hass...
[1] https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-justice...
With that in mind, it's a bit unfortunate you're not willing or able to share any evidence for your beliefs with us and I fear it might make it hard for the rest of us to take them seriously - right now they mostly read as bad-faith trolling and derailment.
Let me know once you feel ready to have a fact-based conversation - for now, I'll leave you to your ad hominems and bold unfounded assertions.
We went from a conversation about Mr. Altman's impunity to one about speculating my stance on some specific immigration system.
The mechanism I described, live for anyone to see.
Is it not correct that a handful people own most of the US and that most likely the same is true in whatever country a prospective immigrant comes from?
Is it not correct that chances are you and I and whichever immigrant are on the don't-own-most-of-the-economy part of the divide?
Is it not correct that conversation about immigration keeps us focused on being angry with people that generally also are just trying to get by and live a good life as opposed to, y'know, the thing this submission started out about? You can see it happening in this very thread!
I will remind you that this thread was initially about an oligarch getting away with things. Somehow, we're already being drawn into immigration. This thread itself is an in-vivo example of the point I'm making.
Debate about immigration policy is a distraction designed to keep both you and immigrants themselves aggravated and ideally fighting each other instead of focusing on the real adversaries, people like Mr Altman.
You have infinitely more in common with a random immigrant than you have with the oligarch class. Most problems blamed on immigration could be solved with money extracted from people like Mr Altman.
Don't let them distract you. Don't give them control over the issues, don't allow them to make us talk about immigration instead of the fact that a few people own most of the US as well as most likely whatever country the immigrant came from.
Nothing about the "hang Mike Pence" chants later defended by Trump. [1]
Nothing about the pipe bombs. [2]
Nothing about Trump inciting the would-be Putschists. [3]
Propaganda isn't just what you say. It's often more about what you leave out.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/us/politics/jan-6-gallows...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-defends-chants-by-rio...
One is morally bankrupt. The other is morally consistent.
I want information freed from corporate control, not freed from my control to be gobbled up by corporate interests.
The point was always democratization, not enclosure.
Reality doesn't care about your wishes. Your unwillingness to consider the systemic mechanisms at play doesn't make them go away, the same way I child covering their eyes doesn't make them invisible.
He's not putting that in your mouth, that is just the reality of what you need leverage for.
If AI truly replaces human labor, the lack of jobs isn't the problem. The problem is the lack of leverage for most of humanity.
Jobs aren't just a source of income. They're a source of leverage over the ownership class - if labor goes on strike, production stops and capital cannot self-reproduce. This leverage is what gave us a living wage, sick leave and basically all concessions that make life livable for anyone that isn't lucky enough to be born as part of the elite.
If AI makes this leverage go away, our problem is bigger than just job loss. The owners of the AI industry will use this now-untethered productive force to completely monopolize resources and set up a system where they are unquestionable god kings.
The rest of us will have more to worry about than just employment. We will be reduced to depending on the charity of people who's record has shown are not exactly the most selfless and kindhearted.
This is the real problem with AI productivity. Jobs are a distraction. Control over production is the real issue. The only way this doesn't end in dystopia is if the public controls AI, one way or another.
This ideological fear of democratic structures ignores the very real threat of autocratic, privately owned structures consolidating more and more power.
The only viable counterweight to corporate power is public power.
But the NSA has been turned inward a long time ago. Don't forget Snowden - all it takes is some fun legalisms.
I think you may have fallen victim to a common misconception of how ideology actually functions.
The most affected by ideology aren't the ones consciously committing to a cause. Ideology is strongest precisely when you think you're outside of it - when your ideological commitments have become so normalized that they are completely invisible to you.
There is no such thing as being unideological, whatever you perceive as such is just a reflection of your own ideology.
If you'd like to delve deeper into the theory of ideology and how it functions, I'd recommend the works of philosophy legend and ideology expert Slavoj Zizek.
There's his seminal work, The Sublime Object of Ideology, which goes into this at depth, but is a very dry and academic read. If you'd like something a bit more digestible, I would recommend the movie The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, which uses a more pop-sci approach of dissecting popular movies to demonstrate their ideological function.
If there's a good enough app on there, I generally stick with that as opposed to trying what Google Play has to offer.
I like having that prefiltering, knowing that the app will be open source, not trying to pull anything shady and not have ads or sell my data. On the Play Store, more often than not, at least one of those is not true.
I think this is also a core part of our disagreement. I think if we allow privatized power structures to grow indefinitely, democracy will no longer be able to constrain them at some point, or they will subvert democracy itself by corrupting elected leadership.
You see both of these in action right now. Think of Elon Musk actively defying Brazilian rule of law [0] or him literally being put into a position where he can neuter the institutions designed to hold him democratically accountable with the DOGE appointment.
To quote MLK - "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children."
I think fundamentally one cannot disentangle democratic control of political power from democratic control of the economy, because economic power can be converted into political power and as long as we let economic power concentrate in the hands of a few unelected oligarchs, they will continue to use it to exert political power as well.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/starlink-tells-brazil-reg...
Even though I'm not too concerned about that specifically, that is clearly a plan they have. [0]
> To this I would respond: there is nothing stopping other nations from building their own abundance machines. As we've seen with AI, distillation cannot be stopped. The knowledge of how to build these machines cannot be censored. Here in Denmark I have high confidence that people will vote to build nationalised abundance machines for the good of all.
I'm not worried about the knowledge. I'm worried about the material conditions. These machines need compute and with that all sorts of inputs. I worry that the first to achieve such an abundance machine will use the abundance generated by it to monopolize control over these inputs.
> You might be surprised to learn that Elon Musk believes capitalism will cease to function in the next 10-20 years because of this. So abundance will force us to move to a system which much more closely resembles communism. It's the transition I'm worried about.
I, too, am worried about the transition, but for different reasons. I believe Elon when he says he believes capitalism will end in a few decades. However, I don't think he has prosperity for all in mind and that end state won't just naturally happen by itself.
I think if we leave the transition to him and his peers, they will use it to build a system where they are untouchable god kings and the rest of us are paupers reduced to their charity.
That, to me, is the core transition risk we need to manage. We need to make sure abundance machines aren't just a device for completely centralizing power in the hands of a few.
I would argue that if we get abundance before fundamentally changing ownership structures, we will get a handful of people that control said abundance and with that, have basically infinite leverage over the rest of humanity.
Labor will no longer be required for their productive needs, so that handful of people that controls the abundance machines will no longer have any incentive to keep the rest of humanity satisfied, or even alive for that matter.
In other words, if we don't change social relations before we get to this state, we will end up in a world where the Musks, Bezos and Zucks of this world control all material production, with the rest of us reduced to being dependent on their charity.
Personally, that sounds like the worst dystopia imaginable.
I will give you that prior attempts at socialism weren't necessarily successful and a lot of people died, however, I also think that argument requires holding one eye shut.
People are dying from capitalism right now. There's a homeless guy in SoMa that is breathing his last breath as we speak. There's entire villages in Africa that can't afford clean water while Nestle sells it in plastic bottles that pollute our planet. The status quo is not without its own violence and I think that is a point that too often gets swept under the rug.
Either way though, I think even if I were to concede that capitalism historically had better outcomes (which I have not been fully sold on! it's positives have just been more articulated imo, but that's another debate.), we are in a critical moment right now.
If we really believe we're to transition into a post-scarcity world, we need to make sure the right social relations are in place before that happens and whatever we have right now is locked in forever.
All criticism of socialism's supposed productive ineffectiveness becomes irrelevant once the transition is done anyways.
It could do that because of the dependence on labor for production, or in other words leverage over the ownership class.
If we accelerate technology to the point where we sever this dependency, all those freedoms will no longer have the leverage required to extract them. Our lives didn't become not worthless because of the steam machine. They became not worthless because of leverage over capital reproduction, and once that's gone they may well become worthless again.
Technology doesn't cause freedom, or at least not directly. Social relations and power dynamics do. Technology just drives those.
I can tell you however, that in the real world, with real incentive structures, if we remove scarcity before we fix ownership, we will get a few feudal lords and the rest of us lacking any leverage their dependence on labour used to give us and dependent on their (historically rather limited) charity.
You cannot have a Star Trek future if you don't fix the social part first. Technological progress will make the social issues worse otherwise. There is no point of technological progress that will magically make the rich and powerful suddenly give up their wealth and power. Maybe in a made-up world, people are less power hungry and greedy. In the real one, more technology owned by a few effectively means that their concentration of wealth and power will just keep increasing at the expense of everyone else.
Getting the tech without the social change first (e.g. what Musk et al are going for) gets you a Cyberpunk dystopia, not a post-scarcity utopia.
What does that even mean? Will we have no more wars? Will we overcome capitalist ownership structures? Will we save our planets ecosystems from extinction? Will we finally be able to eradicate hunger and homelessness?
Or are we just talking more fancy gadgets for the rich at the expense of all of the above?