In the future, those who succeed will be the owners of capital.
Something happened in the 80s, and it wasn't "the dawn of a new technology". It happened specifically in the US, and was done by their government.
Yeah, but we were talking about only success, not winning.
In the past and the present, you could succeed purely on a combination of skill, talent and labour. This approach looks like it will not work much longer.
We exchange our knowledge, time, and skill for money. If this exchange is no longer viable — because similar value can be accessed via LLM agents — we'll have no way of making money.
I do think some (non-billionaire) people will survive the transition, but the question then becomes: what happens to everyone else?
When billionaires say "think about the trillions of people that will benefit from AI" and some notion of living in a post scarcity world, they are talking about _their_ descendants, not yours.
Nobody wants to be king of the ashes. The future is going to be the same as now, just with a little less menial work.
You can also inherit talent, but "the descendants of those worthy are worthy" is a belief humanity spilled a lot of blood to get away from.
No. In the future, those who succeed will be the children of the owners of capital.
See The Economist, February 2025: https://archive.is/PCoWl
Same as it ever was…
