Agreed.

We have the ability to reshape the economy to adapt to higher productivity. It’s why work hours are less than half of what they used to be a century ago. Plus we have vacation days, children are free from labour except to teach discipline and skills, we have retirement, and most recently time off while we raise our infants. All this because of just the very recent productivity increases (relatively speaking).

Complaining about less work to do is the wrong way to think about it. Having more time off allows us the option to enjoy life more thoroughly, and be productive in other ways: artisanal and creative works… we can anlso use our human ability to innovate and invent.

Sadly a lot of that isn't the case in the US. There is no guaranteed vacation days, sicks days, or parental leave here. At least not from the federal government. Plus we don't have universal healthcare. We pay more for healthcare and get far less coverage than countries with universal healthcare.

Things do vary state by state. Look at the minimum wage which is set at $7.25/hr by the federal government, but is $17/hr in my home state of NY.

The Billionaire class doesn't want a population with time to learn and think for themselves. They want people either gone or continue to live paycheck to paycheck, too busy to keep a roof over their head to protest or demand reform.

Sadly AI is already used to monitor everyone, everywhere, on everything. It's been developed in Gaza and the West Bank and is now being deployed in the US.
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/machine-surveillance-is-being-super-charged-by-large-ai-models
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-ai-can-enable-public-surveillance/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/08/anti-defamation-league-surveillance

We can build a post scarcity world, but all signs point to building George Orwell's 1984.

ICE is not to get rid of illegal Immigrants, it's to keep the US in control
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ice-ai-cameras-surveillance-flock-safety-b2903365.html
Inside the AI police tech firm whose data is being fed to ICE

Meanwhile

Canada prepping response to hypothetical US military invasion for first time in a century, report says
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/canada-trump-us-military-invasion-b2904279.html


This AI gold rush is leading us right towards WW3. Trump is desperately seeking resources to keep the AI bubble and the US afloat. But it will have to burst to be able to make real changes.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/23/artificial-intelligence-ai-bubble-bursts-humans-take-back-control

The real bubble is not stock valuations but the inflated ego of an industry that thinks it is just one more datacentre away from computational divinity. When the correction comes, when the US’s Icarus economy hits the cold sea, there will be a chance for other voices to be heard on the subject of risk and regulation. It may not come in 2026, but the moment is nearing when the starkness of the choice on offer and the need to confront it becomes unavoidable. Should we build a world where AI is put to the service of humanity, or will it be the other way round?


For now the higher productivity AI can provide is not growing more food, not building more houses, not cleaning up the environment, not building fusion power plants, not building water desalination plants. More efficient desk jobs are not fixing the real problems.

AI does escalate developement where technology is concerned though and improvement in health diagnosis and treatment. Just as it more effectively identifies cancers compared to Dr judgement alone. Although as you point out many things don't need new technology but simply better resource management and ironically AI is very resource hungry.

Some of the ground breaking tech advances of the next century may still be due to it (fusion power, new materials, new drugs etc)

The wealthy will sell to the wealthy.  They're going to have all the money, anyway.

Rather than prices dropping to account for those with proportionally shrinking income, we're going to see prices climb as the marketing target shifts to the well-off.  We're already watching the percentage of consumer spending generated by the higher tax brackets grow compared to previous years, which means the appeal of selling to the lower brackets is fading.

The philosophy seems to be that raising margins and cutting volume is a better long-term strategy for a world where AI is doing much of the work.

An example is Microsoft raising Xbox margins to 30%.  They don't care if they lose customers as long as they have plenty of whales to hunt and well-off consumers aren't going to care if other people are squeezed out.  If 30% succeeds, count on that number going up again.  Microsoft is absolutely positioning themselves for a future where they can sell their products to rich people and corporations even if the bottom falls out.  Other industries are on the same path.

As wealth disparity climbs, prices and consumer debt are going to climb along with it and the lower classes will gradually be abandoned by the major brands and conglomerates.

This only works for luxury goods, services, and investments. Any industry that depends on selling a normal or inferior good (the majority of industries and GDP) is going to be hit hard. The wealthy might buy bigger yachts or mansions, but they're not going to be buying more bread, milk or smartphones. These things only have a limited capacity to "get better", so you probably won't see much investment in making luxury versions of them. Likewise, you can only have so much production of yachts and mansions before those markets become saturated and the values of these "assets" stall. 

The wealthy also tend to under-consume for their wealth-share, instead hoarding their wealth. This especially becomes true during a deflationary spiral. 

The funny thing is the field of AI is moving so fast that even though this survey wasn't completed till November 10th the capabilities of publicly available AI has already notably improved since then with the 2nd half of November having the release of both Gemini 3 and Claude Opus 4.5. The latter in particular has brought about a significant leap forward in coding capabilities to the extent that I've been seeing lots of professional coders and whatnot rave about Claude lately so it does seem like this year could see a big shift in the coding field.

Another thing is AI agents like the one in this video that came out just earlier this month might start making a significant difference in the next 1-2 years. Mass adoption of things like that in workplaces by the end of this decade feels like a very real possibility. Either way AI is gonna massively change the world when it gets capable enough, the only debate really is how long that'll take. Right now I'm thinking 2030s for AGI but 2040s is possible as well.

I think we'll have systems that outperform (nearly) all humans in white collar work by the early 2030's, but not everyone will accept AGI as here until embodied entities are also prevalent, which probably is more towards the middle or end of that decade. 

What's currently more interesting than VLMs/LLM's in my opinion is the work being done on trained world models (ex VL-JEPA, Nvidia's various world models, Google's Genie, etc) as well as hybrid systems that combine physical/ground-truth models with VLM's (a recent example from MIT.)  In general VLM's/LLM's seem to be a very useful component in all current systems, because they can generate a searchable latent space effortlessly, that the other components traverse/search on. But they probably aren't sufficient for getting us to AGI.

Hardware will catch up too. We probably will (or likely China will be the leader in this) have commercial, scalable photonic computers in the early 2030's and that will solve a lot of the data center energy issues surrounding AI as energy costs come down about a hundred fold for the same compute. 

I agree with everything you’re saying. Not sure about the World War 3 thing, but I do believe the threat of it has grown considerably under Trump for a variety of reasons… mainly incompetence and the lack of emotional regulation that he and seemingly everyone in his administration seems to have: like, is cluster B personality disorder a requirement to be in Trump’s inner circle? The sort of monotony and lack of diversity in temperament and thought is the sort of thing you see among adolescents.

No doubt AI has been abused and that it is proliferating faster than what is ideal from both a legal and economic standpoint… and it has the potential to do irreparable harm to culture as a result in a similar way to social media… Social media, in its earlier phases, Facebook, was all about organizing parties and posting pictures of the funniest most drunken things from those parties… the moment employers and advertisers reached in, along with algorithmic curation and propaganda, there should have been a fuck-ton of regulation; at least once it was clear what it was actually going to be used for.

AI should be regulated based on arguments from its critics, since we saw how social media went and can make good assumptions where AI will go. Already, Elon Musk’s AI gives pedophiles the ability to take photos of your children off of social media and “de-clothe” them; that should definitely be investigated, that feature should have obviously been illegal.

IMO, put constraints on AI that severely limits it to its best features: a productivity tool, and not a child abuse aid, or one that can be used to steal art and intellectual property that should be protected by copyright law.

World models like Genie is actually the aspect I'm most excited for in the near future since this year seems likely for the first publicly available one that's at least semi-decent. I expect Genie 4 to be revealed within the next few months and with the insane progress between 2 and 3 in just 8 months it should be mind blowing. I really hope they let the public use that one even if you need to pay for a subscription since I can't wait to mess around with that sort of thing.