You know, anyone can say things. Rants are cheap. What we need, though, is critical thinking. Not just, “Look, three stars are in alignment; it’s the constellation Triangulum.” This article expresses many opinions. It draws lines between stars. But many other lines could be drawn. Maybe we should believe this analysis because it sounds passionate? “He uses cuss words! He must be invested! He talks about CEOs! He must be an insider!” No. Anyone can point out obvious, insignificant data and rant about it. We need facts and logical arguments, not rants. Less of this.
It's typical AI slop - a lot of points, dense text, no clear direction or structure and despite his obvious efforts in editing, just bloody un-readable.
Ughh..Lets put people, humans, front and center again -I'm in the AI space too but when it comes to content and insight we need to be human focused and not machine driven. Especially opinion and insight pieces.
Bilal is not a writer he is a developer and founder. he founded a two person startup to use AI to produce podcasts. He calls himself a 'Product Engineer' which just means he is using claude and AI to develop..
The article he wrote has all the hallmarks of a lot of AI hyperbole and style. The author has some education in economics but no indication of any writing ability. so who knows what his real writing style is. I too can generate a similar article with Claude in about 30 seconds. Does that need to be read on top of HN too?
e.g this use of AI of the word 'line' is sooo annoying: The "they just overhired during COVID and are self correcting" line was the dominant"
So this ai article about ai is out there.. its out there influencing us even though it is largely speculation, hype and AI-content. The site he has is all AI written (which I am not opposed to but Bilal never worked at Meta, he never spoke with anyone in senior leadership.. So this is an opinion piece driven by AI influencer..that reaches the top of HN
Ok so what about its content here is the points he made (who knows how many he really thought of or that Claude created)
1. AI layoffs structural, not cyclical—"measurers" (middle management, finance, legal) hit hardest
Only producers/sellers and top leadership safe; the coordinating middle gets cut
(WHO knows if this is correct?)
2. Founder-led firms cut first—board trust buys 12–24 month head start
(Everyone is laying off, economy sucks, AI Cap expenditure and uncertianty..)
3. "10x engineer" becomes "1000x"; token data makes leverage brutally measurable
(not right now..yes for quickly built MVPs hardly as fast -1000x is just hyperbole)
4. Inequality explodes—first trillionaire soon, many to follow
(Pure speculation)
5. 2028 political backlash predicted: anti-elite, anti-AI populism, plus xenophobia
(sure maybe)
5. Regulation may cost U.S. the race vs. China
(hype driven influencer speil - AI is barely speeding up as fast as VC Bros are predicting)
That's the optimistic viewpoint. It assumes Something Will Be Done.
It's unlikely that much will be done in the US over the next few years, because the government is deadlocked and not oriented towards solving problems.
The "AI" we have right now seems to be able to replace at least 20%-30% of white collar jobs. Maybe more as it improves. The layoffs are underway.
Now and then I remember going to the Burger King in SF next to the cable car turntable at Market Street, and hearing some homeless people talking about the good old days when they were printers and Linotype operators. That was a good union job once. Now it's gone.
We know what Universal Basic Income looks like. It looks like this.[1] I used to take a bus past those housing projects. Warehousing useless people is not a good solution.
What country seems to be preparing to handle AI unemployment well? Is there any model to copy?
That is just the latest adaptation of AI boosting. List the downsides, be empathetic but close with the real strategy:
"To get AI, we need the people, which includes the measurers, on board. To get the people on board, we need to give them something: money, security, dignity, a credible story about where they fit. We do not have to figure out the long-run answer to what humans are for. We just have to manage the next five years."
The blogger otherwise experiments with gastown-like setups and is maybe afraid that his toy will disappear:
The bloom is off the AI rose and the consulting class doesn't have a good replacement magic bean yet. Expect more fumbling like this until they arrive at the next narrative.
Yeah, if even 5% of the work requires human input, that means that the maximum achievable productivity benefit is 20x. But in my experience, that style of work looks too much like 'dude in his bedroom doing whatever he wants' for management to allow such independence. So you get loaded up with meetings, admin tasks etc. which kill most of the gains.
First and most importantly, it's not really about LLMs, it's about AGI, and the second does not necessarily follow from the first; LLMs in their current state are pretty clearly not AGI, and most of the LLM-world progression in the last few years has been about better tooling/interfaces, refinements in training data and techniques and people learning how to use LLMs effectively rather than the huge leaps in fundamental capability that we saw in earlier years. It seems more likely that at this point, when AGI comes, it will be something entirely new or something that LLMs are only a component of, rather than "we built an LLM with ten trillion parameters and suddenly it became God".
Second, it's not even really about AGI, it's about AGI superintelligence. And more than that, it's about affordable AGI superintelligence, assuming that such a thing won't cost billions a year to operate.
> LLMs in their current state are pretty clearly not AGI
That depends a lot on definitions. It's artificial, it's very general, and by many measures it's intelligent - often superhumanly so, especially when compared to the average human.
That covers the A, the G, and the I. So why is it "clearly not AGI"?
I find takes like this weird for the primary economic conundrum of 'who' exactly will this increased productivity be for , to produce what , to render what service , when everyone is out of their jobs ?
We have to handle this phase transition process deftly.
We have so many problems to solve and we need people to solve them. AI will aid them in that.
Let's say there are there are only 1 million people in the world and all the money is concentrated under 1 person. There will be no economy at all. This implies some form of UBI is coming. This is the main reason why Christian tradition had the concept of Debt Jubilee
If UBI is not coming, youths will force the rich to share the abundance because they now a concentrated target to attack. ie Data centres. Concentration works both ways. Rich can accumulate power. But that power has a physical manifestation. And that could get attacked.
An employee allegedly burned down a 1.2 million-square-foot Kimberly-Clark toilet paper warehouse in Ontario, California, causing an estimated ($500) million in damage. The massive 2026 Ontario Warehouse Fire was set on April 7, 2026.
> Some engineers, given a fixed token budget, generate exponentially more (and better) output. Other engineers waste their tokens. The variance is enormous, and unlike most performance variance, it is now directly measurable. HR has never had a clearer signal of leverage.
This doesn't make sense to me. "A clearer signal of leverage" implies an objective way to measure software engineering output, which has been the white whale of engineering management for the last 50 years.
> [performance variance between engineers] is now directly measurable [by measuring token usage]
… ie token use ~= productivity output
unfortunately measuring the number of tokens used is about as useful as a measure of productivity/performance as is measuring the number of times i hopped around on one foot last week (less time hopping ~= more time coding).
it’s just a measure of the number of tokens that an engineer used. it doesn’t necessarily mean that engineer is more productive. they might be doing more tokens because they ended up re-doing one minor feature a hundred times because they don’t understand the language / requirements etc. it could even be a negative relationship to productivity / performance!
pretty sure that’s what gp was getting at. see LoSC.
> It’s basically saying that good engineers are better at using the tool.
That's extremely reductive. It's perfectly possible for an engineer to be both a fantastic engineer, and bad at using AI. The opposite also exists, the great AI user, who is a terrible engineer.
The idea that these two "skills" are somehow 100% correlated or there's a causation link between them is completely unfounded. The person who becomes a fine engineer with AI, might have been an absolutely terrible engineer without it.
Most of finance and IT runs on arbitraging complexity. If humans were a rational species, we would have no soldiers and wars. Will AI change it, and reduce the complexity? It could, but I doubt it.
The future is bleak for many, but jobs lost is the least of our problems.
To the author - please don't post AI-generated slop, even if you edited it to look less like slop. It not only insults the reader's intelligence, it takes out the fun out of reading. If I wanted to read slop, I'd have generated it myself.
I’d be more impressed if this article weren’t obviously written by AI.
Regarding the idea of a rise of “trillionaires”, gobal wealth is about $470T. Unless there is a gigantic expansion of the middle class from formerly poor people, it is impossible to have more than 470 trillionaires.
The idea of a 1 person billion dollar company or 5-10 employee in the Fortune 500 is laughable. Any business doing that much turnover is going to be hiring lots of vendors and contractors. I guess they could decide to outsource nearly all operations to keep headcount low, but the idea of one singular person generating a billion dollars of value from labour alone with no assistance from capital of an employer is likewise laughable.
I wonder what percentage of that wealth is tied up in speculative assets, such as stocks whose value is predicated on the company being worth that much at some point in the future, or 'land', as in things like real estate that used to cost a whole lot less, but now that speculative wealth created a lot of spending power for a scare resource, it now costs a whole lot more.
I would say an absolutely non-trivial amount, especially in the developed world.
I'm tired of people who, when they don't like an article, comment that it was "obviously written by AI" instead of arguing its merits.
As for your points, global wealth is not a fixed pie, so it's not "impossible to have more than 470 trillionaires". Re:"1 person billion dollar company or 5-10 employee in the Fortune 500 is laughable" - it is difficult but not impossible. Currently, the company ranked at the bottom of the Fortune 500 (No. 500) is Vulcan Materials, with a revenue of ~$8 billion. I can imagine a company combining domain expertise with amazing AI/engineers to achieve superlative product-market fit and hit this revenue number.
I'm not an economist, but if we have runaway inflation (not saying we will), the value of the dollar will plummet and it won't seem too strange. In the 1960s, Gilligan's Island talks of the Millionaire and His Wife. My parents recently retired as millionaires and are definitely not upper class. Inflation can easily change the definitions of millions, billions, and trillions while doing nothing to change the class struggle.
I vibe with the article but I think the disruption period is going to be closer to 15 years instead of 5. The idea of billionaires giving up 20% now or 100% later is powerful.
> Founders have the board's trust to make decisions that look brutal in the short term. Hired CEOs do not. A hired CEO cutting 20% of headcount in a single round risks getting fired by a board nervous about optics. A founder cutting 20% writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and gets called brave.
So much of what's currently wrong with our society can be narrowed down to two things: risks and incentives.
We have incentivized mass layoffs with the erasure of any and all duties a company might have outside of those to shareholders. Fewer people working, lower costs in the next ninety days. Long-term costs remain to be seen, but that's not what finance bros care about. They want to know the quarterly outlook.
Second, we've eliminated all risk once you get past a certain level of wealth and success. There's nothing "brave" about firing hundreds or thousands of people if you're in the c-suite, at least not in the United States. Like I said before, the shareholders are happy, and you'll be rewarded for meeting the target that the board (which was elected by the shareholders) met for profit. You may very well be given a multiple of the average American's lifetime earnings in a single year for your performance. The people who got laid off - assuming that it doesn't destroy their mental health to the point where they attempt/succeed with self-harm - will bury yet another round of financial dreams and hopes and try to find something else to pay off their debts. Will it be as good? Probably not, but we've started calling that the "creative destruction of capitalism", so they buy into that and move on, apathetically, with their lives. The c-suite and shareholders are effectively isolated from any sort of negative outcome through articles of incorporation, government bailouts, and sheer financial inertia.
This directly contradicts the old saying "with great reward comes great risk". The people getting the reward - the massive bonuses, the kiss-ass articles in the media, a life effectively free of financial consequence - aren't the ones assuming the risk. The rank-and-file are.
That hasn't been a real problem until now. AI as we're now implementing it has the potential to cause real damage to the financial futures of massive chunks of the population. Knowledge work is going to get less and less valuable. The people who worked in knowledge work fields often went into debt to be able to do so, sometimes for the first 10-20 years of their careers. Some have put off emotionally-meaningful things like starting families for the promised payout that now might not come at all.
That being said, the author thinks that UBI is a potential salve. It's not. Over the last 40 years, more and more people were told that they should find a job that means something to them, that gives them at least some measure of fulfillment. They're not going to get that from a check delivered once a month from an expanded OASDI scheme. They're going to look at life as effectively a game we all play by a set of rules, and the rules have now been changed several times, each one screwing them more and more. Those at the top are the ones making the rules, and they keep gaining more and more. Instead of giving people the chance to work their way up the latter in a career, the rulemakers have now said that the best you can hope for is essentially welfare that will be unlikely to let you meet your long-term goals for your life. If you maybe put off having children until a later time to buy them more financial stability, you effectively blew your best parenting years for nothing.
This could see a great realignment of risk-vs-reward back to where it's said it should be. If you're going to use AI to become a part of the first class of trillionaires, you can bet that a lot of social ire produced by what I've described above will be directed directly your way. In a society like the US, you can bet at least some of the malcontents will resort to violence to express their ire.
Author here. Seeing comments that this is a doomer article for some reason. I'm an AI optimist. It's humans that scare me. The article is about managing the transition to Valhalla. My toy projects and my job can disappear and I'm fine with it.
Create shows and movies. I, like you and everyone else, will figure it out. And it'll be better than what we have today just like its better to drink coffee and code vs toil at a farm 20 hours a day.
You know, anyone can say things. Rants are cheap. What we need, though, is critical thinking. Not just, “Look, three stars are in alignment; it’s the constellation Triangulum.” This article expresses many opinions. It draws lines between stars. But many other lines could be drawn. Maybe we should believe this analysis because it sounds passionate? “He uses cuss words! He must be invested! He talks about CEOs! He must be an insider!” No. Anyone can point out obvious, insignificant data and rant about it. We need facts and logical arguments, not rants. Less of this.
It's typical AI slop - a lot of points, dense text, no clear direction or structure and despite his obvious efforts in editing, just bloody un-readable.
Ughh..Lets put people, humans, front and center again -I'm in the AI space too but when it comes to content and insight we need to be human focused and not machine driven. Especially opinion and insight pieces.
The author is this guy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/biltahir/
Bilal is not a writer he is a developer and founder. he founded a two person startup to use AI to produce podcasts. He calls himself a 'Product Engineer' which just means he is using claude and AI to develop..
The article he wrote has all the hallmarks of a lot of AI hyperbole and style. The author has some education in economics but no indication of any writing ability. so who knows what his real writing style is. I too can generate a similar article with Claude in about 30 seconds. Does that need to be read on top of HN too?
e.g this use of AI of the word 'line' is sooo annoying: The "they just overhired during COVID and are self correcting" line was the dominant"
So this ai article about ai is out there.. its out there influencing us even though it is largely speculation, hype and AI-content. The site he has is all AI written (which I am not opposed to but Bilal never worked at Meta, he never spoke with anyone in senior leadership.. So this is an opinion piece driven by AI influencer..that reaches the top of HN
Ok so what about its content here is the points he made (who knows how many he really thought of or that Claude created)
1. AI layoffs structural, not cyclical—"measurers" (middle management, finance, legal) hit hardest Only producers/sellers and top leadership safe; the coordinating middle gets cut (WHO knows if this is correct?)
2. Founder-led firms cut first—board trust buys 12–24 month head start (Everyone is laying off, economy sucks, AI Cap expenditure and uncertianty..)
3. "10x engineer" becomes "1000x"; token data makes leverage brutally measurable (not right now..yes for quickly built MVPs hardly as fast -1000x is just hyperbole)
4. Inequality explodes—first trillionaire soon, many to follow (Pure speculation) 5. 2028 political backlash predicted: anti-elite, anti-AI populism, plus xenophobia (sure maybe)
5. Regulation may cost U.S. the race vs. China (hype driven influencer speil - AI is barely speeding up as fast as VC Bros are predicting)
That's the optimistic viewpoint. It assumes Something Will Be Done. It's unlikely that much will be done in the US over the next few years, because the government is deadlocked and not oriented towards solving problems.
The "AI" we have right now seems to be able to replace at least 20%-30% of white collar jobs. Maybe more as it improves. The layoffs are underway. Now and then I remember going to the Burger King in SF next to the cable car turntable at Market Street, and hearing some homeless people talking about the good old days when they were printers and Linotype operators. That was a good union job once. Now it's gone.
We know what Universal Basic Income looks like. It looks like this.[1] I used to take a bus past those housing projects. Warehousing useless people is not a good solution.
What country seems to be preparing to handle AI unemployment well? Is there any model to copy?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_Homes
That is just the latest adaptation of AI boosting. List the downsides, be empathetic but close with the real strategy:
"To get AI, we need the people, which includes the measurers, on board. To get the people on board, we need to give them something: money, security, dignity, a credible story about where they fit. We do not have to figure out the long-run answer to what humans are for. We just have to manage the next five years."
The blogger otherwise experiments with gastown-like setups and is maybe afraid that his toy will disappear:
https://www.hackyexperiments.com/experiments/agent-order
This is so hyperbolic I don’t even know what to say. A 1000x Engineer? Have you actually used these tools?
The bloom is off the AI rose and the consulting class doesn't have a good replacement magic bean yet. Expect more fumbling like this until they arrive at the next narrative.
Yeah, if even 5% of the work requires human input, that means that the maximum achievable productivity benefit is 20x. But in my experience, that style of work looks too much like 'dude in his bedroom doing whatever he wants' for management to allow such independence. So you get loaded up with meetings, admin tasks etc. which kill most of the gains.
This article suffers from two things:
First and most importantly, it's not really about LLMs, it's about AGI, and the second does not necessarily follow from the first; LLMs in their current state are pretty clearly not AGI, and most of the LLM-world progression in the last few years has been about better tooling/interfaces, refinements in training data and techniques and people learning how to use LLMs effectively rather than the huge leaps in fundamental capability that we saw in earlier years. It seems more likely that at this point, when AGI comes, it will be something entirely new or something that LLMs are only a component of, rather than "we built an LLM with ten trillion parameters and suddenly it became God".
Second, it's not even really about AGI, it's about AGI superintelligence. And more than that, it's about affordable AGI superintelligence, assuming that such a thing won't cost billions a year to operate.
> LLMs in their current state are pretty clearly not AGI
That depends a lot on definitions. It's artificial, it's very general, and by many measures it's intelligent - often superhumanly so, especially when compared to the average human.
That covers the A, the G, and the I. So why is it "clearly not AGI"?
Ask your favorite SOTA LLM, "Why are SOTA LLMs very clearly not AGI?", and be enlightened.
According to the article, isn't it the "measurers" that are getting fired? So what is the "Revenge of the Measurers"?
I find takes like this weird for the primary economic conundrum of 'who' exactly will this increased productivity be for , to produce what , to render what service , when everyone is out of their jobs ?
"It requires the people losing their jobs not burning the system down before the system has time to redistribute the gains."
Who, and how, will the gains be redistributed?
Some loose thoughts on AI singularity
We have to handle this phase transition process deftly.
We have so many problems to solve and we need people to solve them. AI will aid them in that.
Let's say there are there are only 1 million people in the world and all the money is concentrated under 1 person. There will be no economy at all. This implies some form of UBI is coming. This is the main reason why Christian tradition had the concept of Debt Jubilee
If UBI is not coming, youths will force the rich to share the abundance because they now a concentrated target to attack. ie Data centres. Concentration works both ways. Rich can accumulate power. But that power has a physical manifestation. And that could get attacked.
An employee allegedly burned down a 1.2 million-square-foot Kimberly-Clark toilet paper warehouse in Ontario, California, causing an estimated ($500) million in damage. The massive 2026 Ontario Warehouse Fire was set on April 7, 2026.
> Some engineers, given a fixed token budget, generate exponentially more (and better) output. Other engineers waste their tokens. The variance is enormous, and unlike most performance variance, it is now directly measurable. HR has never had a clearer signal of leverage.
This doesn't make sense to me. "A clearer signal of leverage" implies an objective way to measure software engineering output, which has been the white whale of engineering management for the last 50 years.
It’s basically saying that good engineers are better at using the tool.
Because of course they are. This is true of every tool up to AI and it’s true for AI.
If you know what you’re doing you’re going to do a better job of getting the AI to produce good output. Isn’t that obvious?
> [performance variance between engineers] is now directly measurable [by measuring token usage]
… ie token use ~= productivity output
unfortunately measuring the number of tokens used is about as useful as a measure of productivity/performance as is measuring the number of times i hopped around on one foot last week (less time hopping ~= more time coding).
it’s just a measure of the number of tokens that an engineer used. it doesn’t necessarily mean that engineer is more productive. they might be doing more tokens because they ended up re-doing one minor feature a hundred times because they don’t understand the language / requirements etc. it could even be a negative relationship to productivity / performance!
pretty sure that’s what gp was getting at. see LoSC.
> It’s basically saying that good engineers are better at using the tool.
That's extremely reductive. It's perfectly possible for an engineer to be both a fantastic engineer, and bad at using AI. The opposite also exists, the great AI user, who is a terrible engineer.
The idea that these two "skills" are somehow 100% correlated or there's a causation link between them is completely unfounded. The person who becomes a fine engineer with AI, might have been an absolutely terrible engineer without it.
> Due process for account suspensions.
Too late, for that. From what I hear, account suspensions with Google are basically the "love scene" from Deliverance.
Most of finance and IT runs on arbitraging complexity. If humans were a rational species, we would have no soldiers and wars. Will AI change it, and reduce the complexity? It could, but I doubt it.
The future is bleak for many, but jobs lost is the least of our problems.
To the author - please don't post AI-generated slop, even if you edited it to look less like slop. It not only insults the reader's intelligence, it takes out the fun out of reading. If I wanted to read slop, I'd have generated it myself.
I wish there were more creativity in AI “thought leadership” than “replace all white collar workers.”
I’d be more impressed if this article weren’t obviously written by AI.
Regarding the idea of a rise of “trillionaires”, gobal wealth is about $470T. Unless there is a gigantic expansion of the middle class from formerly poor people, it is impossible to have more than 470 trillionaires.
The idea of a 1 person billion dollar company or 5-10 employee in the Fortune 500 is laughable. Any business doing that much turnover is going to be hiring lots of vendors and contractors. I guess they could decide to outsource nearly all operations to keep headcount low, but the idea of one singular person generating a billion dollars of value from labour alone with no assistance from capital of an employer is likewise laughable.
I wonder what percentage of that wealth is tied up in speculative assets, such as stocks whose value is predicated on the company being worth that much at some point in the future, or 'land', as in things like real estate that used to cost a whole lot less, but now that speculative wealth created a lot of spending power for a scare resource, it now costs a whole lot more.
I would say an absolutely non-trivial amount, especially in the developed world.
I'm tired of people who, when they don't like an article, comment that it was "obviously written by AI" instead of arguing its merits.
As for your points, global wealth is not a fixed pie, so it's not "impossible to have more than 470 trillionaires". Re:"1 person billion dollar company or 5-10 employee in the Fortune 500 is laughable" - it is difficult but not impossible. Currently, the company ranked at the bottom of the Fortune 500 (No. 500) is Vulcan Materials, with a revenue of ~$8 billion. I can imagine a company combining domain expertise with amazing AI/engineers to achieve superlative product-market fit and hit this revenue number.
I'm not an economist, but if we have runaway inflation (not saying we will), the value of the dollar will plummet and it won't seem too strange. In the 1960s, Gilligan's Island talks of the Millionaire and His Wife. My parents recently retired as millionaires and are definitely not upper class. Inflation can easily change the definitions of millions, billions, and trillions while doing nothing to change the class struggle.
I vibe with the article but I think the disruption period is going to be closer to 15 years instead of 5. The idea of billionaires giving up 20% now or 100% later is powerful.
Plenty of competent engineers - who are clearly builders have also been let go. Enough with your trite analysis.
I’ve been saying the next step for companies is to try to cut token cost while maintaining output. That makes sense.
The rest of this article doesn’t. HR is going to measure what? No they aren’t.
A 1000x engineer? Really?
Reads like more AI fearmongering because it fits a convenient narrative.
Nope - I'm as optimistic about AI as they come. It's humans that scare me. The article is about managing the transition to Valhalla.
Feel free to be optimistic about AI, but please don't serve us AI slop as your own authorship.
Goddammit, you can tell this is AI slop from the first two sentences.
I just can't get excited about a technology whose sole purpose is to replace me.
> Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Applying this broadly to most firms today you can divide this up into:
> 1. The producers and marketers (PMs/Sales). [...]
> 2. The leadership (CEO/VPs). [...]
I'm sorry, what? Product managers are producers and executive leadership are innovators, but engineers are just waste?
ai slop
> Founders have the board's trust to make decisions that look brutal in the short term. Hired CEOs do not. A hired CEO cutting 20% of headcount in a single round risks getting fired by a board nervous about optics. A founder cutting 20% writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and gets called brave.
So much of what's currently wrong with our society can be narrowed down to two things: risks and incentives.
We have incentivized mass layoffs with the erasure of any and all duties a company might have outside of those to shareholders. Fewer people working, lower costs in the next ninety days. Long-term costs remain to be seen, but that's not what finance bros care about. They want to know the quarterly outlook.
Second, we've eliminated all risk once you get past a certain level of wealth and success. There's nothing "brave" about firing hundreds or thousands of people if you're in the c-suite, at least not in the United States. Like I said before, the shareholders are happy, and you'll be rewarded for meeting the target that the board (which was elected by the shareholders) met for profit. You may very well be given a multiple of the average American's lifetime earnings in a single year for your performance. The people who got laid off - assuming that it doesn't destroy their mental health to the point where they attempt/succeed with self-harm - will bury yet another round of financial dreams and hopes and try to find something else to pay off their debts. Will it be as good? Probably not, but we've started calling that the "creative destruction of capitalism", so they buy into that and move on, apathetically, with their lives. The c-suite and shareholders are effectively isolated from any sort of negative outcome through articles of incorporation, government bailouts, and sheer financial inertia.
This directly contradicts the old saying "with great reward comes great risk". The people getting the reward - the massive bonuses, the kiss-ass articles in the media, a life effectively free of financial consequence - aren't the ones assuming the risk. The rank-and-file are.
That hasn't been a real problem until now. AI as we're now implementing it has the potential to cause real damage to the financial futures of massive chunks of the population. Knowledge work is going to get less and less valuable. The people who worked in knowledge work fields often went into debt to be able to do so, sometimes for the first 10-20 years of their careers. Some have put off emotionally-meaningful things like starting families for the promised payout that now might not come at all.
That being said, the author thinks that UBI is a potential salve. It's not. Over the last 40 years, more and more people were told that they should find a job that means something to them, that gives them at least some measure of fulfillment. They're not going to get that from a check delivered once a month from an expanded OASDI scheme. They're going to look at life as effectively a game we all play by a set of rules, and the rules have now been changed several times, each one screwing them more and more. Those at the top are the ones making the rules, and they keep gaining more and more. Instead of giving people the chance to work their way up the latter in a career, the rulemakers have now said that the best you can hope for is essentially welfare that will be unlikely to let you meet your long-term goals for your life. If you maybe put off having children until a later time to buy them more financial stability, you effectively blew your best parenting years for nothing.
This could see a great realignment of risk-vs-reward back to where it's said it should be. If you're going to use AI to become a part of the first class of trillionaires, you can bet that a lot of social ire produced by what I've described above will be directed directly your way. In a society like the US, you can bet at least some of the malcontents will resort to violence to express their ire.
Author here. Seeing comments that this is a doomer article for some reason. I'm an AI optimist. It's humans that scare me. The article is about managing the transition to Valhalla. My toy projects and my job can disappear and I'm fine with it.
I talk more about the gran future here
https://www.hackyexperiments.com/blog/machines-of-loving-emb...
What are you going to do if your job disappears? Sit in Thiel's whirlpool?
> Sit in Thiel's whirlpool?
Hands down the funniest comment on HN in a while. Love it:)
Create shows and movies. I, like you and everyone else, will figure it out. And it'll be better than what we have today just like its better to drink coffee and code vs toil at a farm 20 hours a day.