11 ms·

The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

• gradus_ad 6mo ago
  >"Wealth passed through property law: wills, trusts, title deeds, institutional relationships. No regression. No noise. Just compounding." Slopspeak detected.
• MrSkelter 6mo ago
  The premise of the article Is so easy to refute that it makes any conclusions drawn ridiculous. Wealth and intelligence aren’t correlated at all. Wealth and education are quite strongly correlated but education isn’t intelligence.
• dankai 6mo ago
  I resubmitted this because somebody flagged the original submission for unclear reasons and it had quite a lot of upvotes in a short time. Perhaps some people are offended by this argument, but it's definitely worthy of a discussion instead of censorship.
  • suddenlybananas 6mo ago
    Well, all of the comments on the old submissions were complaining about the essay being AI slop. I haven't read the essay so I couldn't say, but that's clearly the reason why.
    • DustinKlent 6mo ago
      I read the whole thing; it's definitely not AI slop. A few sentences taken out of an hour long read that are commonly used by AI doesn't mean the article was composed by AI. You'll find similar artifacts in any longer published work, including those published prior to AI.
    • waffletower 6mo ago
      That's clearly the "stated" reason why.
  • advael 6mo ago
    The essay, if taken seriously, has a logical conclusion that I'm sure a decent number on this website find uncomfortable, but perhaps more importantly, which at least some people who might have disproportionate power to make such decisions prefer not be discussed too heavily. This is a microcosm of the larger phenomenon
  • bspammer 6mo ago
    It's because it's AI written with all the usual over-the-top grandeur and a ridiculous number of negative parallelisms. > No regression. No noise. Just compounding. > the transition is measured in years, not decades. > not by decree, but by ruthless compounding. I'm not interested in what an LLM thinks about the social implications of LLMs.
    • MattGrommes 6mo ago
      This isn't really on you but the problem I have with comments like this is that I think most people write poorly so I can't tell if those are LLM artifacts or LinkedIn-speak artifacts. I need better heuristics for these things.
  • applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
    It was flagged for being clearly botted, and I don't just mean LLM-generated (although it is also that). When I posted on and flagged the old submission, I noted that it had over two dozen upvotes in 15 minutes, despite the essay having a helpful "54 min read" indicator at the top. I truly do not believe the upvotes on these submissions are organic, and it really destroys my faith in HN that this was restored when the first one went down successfully. (If by some chance I am wrong and this monster of an LLM-generated essay really got dozens of people instantly upvoting it from the title alone, that fact would also not give me much faith in HN, I have to add.)
    • snikeris 6mo ago
      You don't have to read the whole thing to upvote it.
      • applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
        Does the first 1/5th or 1/4th of the article provide such a compelling case that one wants to stop reading it and return to upvote it? I certainly didn't think so.
        • ankaz 6mo ago
          [dead]
    • kjkjadksj 6mo ago
      I upvoted this without reading. For me sometimes the article is just the spark for a far more interesting set of comments that overshadow it. And it is really that I am voting for.
      • applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
        That is certainly an interesting perspective.
        • 6mo ago
  • waffletower 6mo ago
    While there are more excessive examples of moderation than Hacker News, "Rate Your Music" moderation is hilariously indulgent and arbitrary from my 2nd hand vantage, but moderation here and elsewhere tends to error on the side of removal and exercise of power. There is no BDSM thrill behind staying one's moderation ability. Many are attracted to moderation just as many police are attracted to their work to get the dopamine that is gifted to them by dominating others. But it might be reductive to think this moderation is tied to an individual's brain treat, and it might instead be useful to consider the host organization -- they may not feel enriched by posts that critique status quo capitalism.
• SilverElfin 6mo ago
  Yep it is definitely being pulled up. The economy feels more winner takes all than ever. After this transition how can anyone without existing capital and moats compete?
  • stego-tech 6mo ago
    The piece gets into that in extensive detail that you should totally go read, but the long and short of it is that even those without capital and moats still have the power of writing law, and we need to exercise that early and often to redistribute capital before its concentration leads to legislative capture. In other words, the obligations of those without Capital is to write laws that demand the benefits of Capital be shared with all.
    • DustinKlent 6mo ago
      "the obligations of those without Capital is to write laws that demand the benefits of Capital be shared with all." How do you propose they do that exactly?
    • hackyhacky 6mo ago
      > even those without capital and moats still have the power of writing law, In the country where I live, politicians pass laws to serve their corporate donors, not the voters. This results in regulatory capture, as the law works to protect the already-entrenched players. Democracy is just another institution co-opted by money. I don't see any realistic way to use democracy to get out of this.
      • 0x4e 6mo ago
        Especially with the way “the law” works now-a-days: Donors, lobbyists, and ring kissers driving what’s instituted.
    • achierius 6mo ago
      > before its concentration leads to legislative capture This already happened
• croes 6mo ago
  It is already pulled up before, AI just pulls faster
• lagniappe 6mo ago
  >Most of the traits you were born with - intelligence, conscientiousness, height, bone density, grip strength, resting heart rate - follow a bell curve. Is this written by AI?
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • profunctor 6mo ago
    Why? The dashes?
    • thrtythreeforty 6mo ago
      There are lots of subtle LLM-ism sentence structures that you can perceive, sort of subconsciously. Spend any amount of time with Claude and you'll unconsciously start to copy them. This essay has several: Sentence structures, heading phrasing, and yes, dashes. I expect people know to start steering LLMs away from em dashes at this point though.
    • sp1nningaway 6mo ago
      The shear volume of writing, the false rigor and vestigial artifacts (preface, interactive charts, MORE filler hidden behind accordion dropdowns) are a tell. I would be more annoyed but I'm fascinated by this kind of false productivity that AI is encouraging. I don't agree with the conclusion anyway, as AI is CURRENTLY providing wealth to me with side projects that wouldn't have been possible to take on 2 years ago.
      • Kubuxu 6mo ago
        Yeah, after two paragraphs, my eyes started skimming it due to low signal-to-noise ratio.
  • pegasus 6mo ago
    Probably some AI assistance was involved. Though you'd expect em dashes above, for example. A better example would be "No regression. No noise. Just compounding." It's not so much as to bother me, and I'm often annoyed by the ever-expanding tide of slop.
• therealdeal2020 6mo ago
  oh gee doomsday is coming yeah yeah
• cglan 6mo ago
  The future (if we keep using money to allocate resources) is something akin to feudalism but worse. If you are born at the bottom you will never rise to the top. It's bleak. Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities. There will be a few well off people with capital. The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones. Everyone else will essentially live in a parallel economy that is borderline biblical. Countries like this already exist in the form of countries with excess access to a single natural resource. See the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
  • rmah 6mo ago
    If the vast majority live at a "borderline biblical" standard of living, then there is simply not enough excess wealth to pay for the data centers (or more accurately, the industrial output necessary to build and maintain those data centers) you're talking about. Agrarian societies (i.e. borderline biblical), by definition, do not have the excess labor necessary for industrial output at any scale (here I mean anything more than a few % of contemporary levels).
    • energy123 6mo ago
      Robots will eventually be better than people at manual labor. I don't claim to know when that crossover will happen.
      • glitchc 6mo ago
        This is still a "hard" problem from a scientific perspective. LLMs haven't taken us any closer to solving the perception, actuation, learning loop. It will require multiple new developments in material science and a new ML paradigm.
        • jevndev 6mo ago
          This is true about LLMs themselves but the developments behind them have been a boon for robotics. I’m mostly familiar with computer vision so I can’t speak to everything, but vision transformers (ViTs is the term to search for) have helped a ton with persistence of object detection/tracking. And depth estimation techniques for monocular cameras have accelerated from the top of the line raw cnn based models from just a few years ago; largely by adding attention layers to their model. I agree that they’re not there yet but I don’t want to discredit the benefits of these recent advancements
• jasonmp85 6mo ago
  [dead]
• 0x4e 6mo ago
  This is when I ask sincerely: how does AI truly benefit the average Joe? Sure it can help you do things “faster” and it can give you “private/cheaper” advice. But, AI feels increasingly like a thing that will make the powerful a lot more powerful with their data centres and automation shenanigans. All the hype feels like it’s being injected into everyone’s brain like a virus. Oh look at this shiny new tool! But, how does it actually improve everyone’s life? We’ve gone from AGI to tokens as a service. Sure, it might cure cancer, but… that’s just uncertain. Sure, we’ll go to space, but… we sure have many problems at home. I’m completely divided here. I love using these tools, and it makes work enjoyable. But, like we read recently “you’re not your work”.
  • apercu 6mo ago
    > Sure, it might cure cancer, but… that’s just uncertain. Sure, we’ll go to space, but… we sure have many problems at home. Sure, it might cure cancer, but only for the wealthiest. Sure, we'll go to space, but only after the planet is irreversibly trashed and poisoned and the only "poors" that will be in space will be the modern equivalent of non-unionized coal miners.
  • coolThingsFirst 6mo ago
    Exactly. AI helps you do things faster which when done have no economic value whatsoever.
  • r0fl 6mo ago
    Does not benefit average Joe now I agree But let’s say we get to ASI. The ai is self owned, ever expanding. It takes over all service jobs, then all labour jobs, the robots create the robots. It lobbies the government, becomes the government Rebuilds all housing with no waste in the process Makes most things available to everyone at no costs, UBI, perfect healthcare, and food, etc Average Joe’s life will be pretty awesome Just give it some more time
    • levanten 6mo ago
      There is no guarantee that the asi would care about human beings at all. Personally, I can’t see why it would.
• renewiltord 6mo ago
  Prompt better. This is 10k words most of which are just garbage filler. Utterly unreadable.
• jorblumesea 6mo ago
  As if this isn't intentional or an added benefit. AI is the wet dream of the capital class, no need to negotiate with greedy workers asking for rights and benefits. There will be a chasm between the wealthy and everyone else. the future is looking more and more like feudalism.
• ctenb 6mo ago
  While the message is valid, it's ironic that this was clearly written by AI.
• botswana99 6mo ago
  The dude has obviously never met a multimillionaire owner of an auto body shop, a house demolition business, or a plumber. Did they do well in high school calc class? No. Are they richer than the author? Yes Blowing up the cognitive hierarchy is a gift that AI gives us. Let's move into an age where hard work and character matter more than your SAT score at 17.
  • triceratops 6mo ago
    Why do you think a high SAT score doesn't need "hard work and character"?
    • trillic 6mo ago
      The SAT is a measure of test-taking ability, socioeconomic status, a narrow band of academic skills, and processing information under time pressure. I don't think it measures much else. Why do you think the SAT is a measure of hard work or character?
      • triceratops 6mo ago
        You think test-taking and information processing ability comes without hard work?
        • trillic 6mo ago
          I think cognitive ability is a real thing with a genuine genetic component; twin studies make that pretty hard to deny. But the SAT measures a narrow slice of ability under conditions that favor prep access, and speaking from experience, scoring well on standardized tests without having to work for it hurt me long term. I coasted on test-taking ability and didn't develop real discipline until adulthood. Without standardized tests, my transcript probably doesn't get me into a top school, I likely don't end up in tech, and honestly maybe I would've been forced to develop a work ethic earlier, which might have been better for me.
    • dragonwriter 6mo ago
• bloppe 6mo ago
  Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it. AI is currently a commodity. Maybe one of the labs will be able to differentiate sufficiently to be able to charge the kinds of premiums they need just to pay back their investors. Maybe, instead, we'll see something akin to the FOSS revolution, where large, high-quality, open training sets are developed to make sure there's always a fair alternative to the big players. Then who actually benefits from AI? Mainly users, not companies. In many ways, the bar to having a competitive advantage is actually lowering. I reckon in the future, simply avoiding a crippling social media addiction that sucks up 4-8 hours of every day will be enough to get rich.
  • shafyy 6mo ago
    You can't just look at real median income. You also need to look at other factors like wealth inequality, housing prices and health care.
    • bloppe 6mo ago
      housing prices and health care are captured by the "real" part of "median real income". Inequality is not, but as long as everybody is getting richer, I'm less concerned about inequality.
      • shafyy 6mo ago
        Inequality is still important even if everybody is getting richer (I disagree that everybody is getting richer, but that's a different discussion). Because wealth and power concentrated in the hand of a few means that a few have outsized influence on politics and society, which is very much eroding the fundaments of how a democracy is supposed to work. Furthermore, there are many studies showing that more wealth inequality results in more consumption in a society. Which is not good for many reasons.
    • Antoniocl 6mo ago
      Well, I think in the context of the parent comment, separating out housing would risk overstating changes in its effect on purchasing power because increases to housing would already be captured by inflation (since we're talking about real median income, which is already inflation adjusted) I agree that housing affordability is a major problem and that looking at it independently could help you quantify if housing specifically has become more unaffordable, but that's a different question then whether the median person's overall purchasing power has declined (considering all of housing, healthcare food etc)
• lucasay 6mo ago
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• est 6mo ago
  > bridge to wealth Not only wealth, many human beings will be "sterilized" by social networks and AI. The "bridge" and another name in biology: cellular differentiation Imagine every human individual is a cell. Every cell had all the equal potentials, we were all stem cells until the year 2026. The whole world is now turning into a multi-cell organism connected by business, information and AI. Many of us may turn into somatic cells one way or another. Which kind of cell lives better? I wrote a blog in Chinese on this https://blog.est.im/2026/stdin-03 https://blog.est.im/2026/stdin-03
• KaiserPro 6mo ago
  This was already "solved" in the 30-50s. Anti-trust, effective taxation, and general social distrust of people who were creating wealth for themselves and not others. obviously this sounds a lot like socialism (which its not, the USA in the 40s was not socialist.) The issue is, discourse is being shaped by those who don't want things to change. Part of the reason why things changed is that lots of countries went through violent revolutions where the rich and powerful were ousted.
• z3t4 6mo ago
  Changing social class has always been very difficult. The solution is to get rid of social classes. Or at least try to even out the difference between the lowest class and highest class.
  • aerhardt 6mo ago
    > Changing social class has always been very difficult It's been very difficult in part because 150+ years of Marxist tradition has not been able to define what a class is. Upwards social mobility by other metrics such as wealth and income, both intra- and inter-generation, is actually provable and real.
• jddj 6mo ago
  Leaving aside the sloppiness of the article, I think a lot of the behaviour in recent memory around crypto and meme stocks, and to an extent the whole rotating bubbles mode that markets seem to be in, can be attributed to this general trend. It's harder and harder to see the traditional path from school to work to some acceptable level of family wealth as being effective/worthwhile, and so we see different flavours of roulette-with-more-steps capturing more of the population's attention.
  • trolleski 6mo ago
    10/10 - also brings to mind Peter Turchin theory of elite overproduction and the immiseration of the masses.
• rdiddly 6mo ago
  Commenting strictly on the metaphor in the title: Did you mean to say ladder? Bridges don't get pulled up. Edit to say: Yes I did think of drawbridges. And Batman is a scientist. But drawbridges are simply "opened" or "raised," and the implication always is that it's temporary and they will soon be "closed" or "lowered." Though they can be sabotaged in the open position. All right fine, OP please change your title to "The drawbridge to wealth is being raised and then permanently damaged so it can't be lowered, by AI."
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • zarzavat 6mo ago
    Drawbridges do
  • kleiba 6mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawbridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawbridge
  • yomismoaqui 6mo ago
    Maybe the author os thinking of a drawbridge (moveable bridge)?
  • bayeslaw 6mo ago
    Finally a useful comment. Thank you :D
• WillAdams 6mo ago
  LLMs look to be the first technological innovation which will not engender an accompanying expansion in the labour market and new jobs to match the increase in the size of the economy --- Karl Marx is finally right.
• 7777777phil 6mo ago
  The sims are really well done, the dynasty simulator especially. You can actually stress-test the argument instead of just nodding along. Appreciate the craft. I have issues with the economics though. The income model is calibrated from three separate literatures that were never estimated together. Different samples, different decades, different identification strategies. Then the big move, βIQ drops to 0.10, βW jumps to 0.65, gets asserted as a scenario and fed into the simulator like it’s an empirical result. The interactivity makes it feel rigorous but you’re mostly just exploring the author’s priors. The skill premium has survived every automation wave we’ve thrown at it, including ones that felt just as terminal. ATMs didn’t kill bank tellers. US teller count went from ~300k to ~500k between 1970 and 2010 (see Bessen paper), because cheaper branches meant more branches. The essay waves off Jevons with “human attention is fixed” but US legal spend is ~$400B/yr against ~$100B in estimated unmet need (LSC data). That’s 25% latent demand just sitting there at current prices. I would see that as saturated. The “27.5% programmer decline” is doing a lot of work. BLS SOC 15-1251 (“computer programmers”) is a narrow legacy bucket that excludes software devs, DevOps, ML engineers, all of which grew. Total software dev employment (15-1252) was up in 2024 vs 2022. Classification artifact, not a labor market signal. And the historical base rate on “this time the bridge closes for good” is… zero. Power loom, ag mechanization, manufacturing to services, analog to digital,etc. each killed the old skill-to-capital channel and built a new one within a generation. You can’t just assert AI is different from all prior GPTs, you have to show the mechanism that prevents a new channel from forming. The essay doesn’t really do that for me. The assortative mating argument cuts against itself imo. If credentials lose signal value, the institutions where sorting happens (elite unis, professional firms) lose sorting power too. The essay predicts mating shifts to “wealth directly” but… how exactly? Credentials were legible because institutions verified them. Strip the institution and you’d expect noisier matching, not tighter. The Fagereng et al. paper it cites is Norwegian data, which has among the lowest wealth inequality in the OECD. Not obvious that translates. Again I generally like the writeup, and I think the essay is right that capital returns are pulling away from labor income and AI accelerates it. But “the bridge narrows and the crossing gets harder” is the defensible version. “Closes permanently within a decade” requires believing something unprecedented will happen on a specific timeline..
  • sp1nningaway 6mo ago
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• waffletower 6mo ago
  Despite the reductive Gaussian determinism, there appears to be much haunting truth to the proposed economic trajectory here.
• gradus_ad 6mo ago
  A rebuttal: the institutional and experiential barriers to wealth generation can be overcome with AI unlike any other technology before. Consider: someone wanting to start a business previously had to negotiate tremendous legal/compliance/technological hurdles. The prospect of going alone given these is very intimidating so most without wealth or connections didn't. Their good ideas languished. Now, everyone has a knowledgeable and forgiving partner and guide.
  • MeetingsBrowser 6mo ago
    > Now, everyone has a knowledgeable and forgiving partner and guide. Well, everyone who can afford the $500/month ultra max pro plan to access unlimited ad free LLMs
  • CodingJeebus 6mo ago
    Let's see how true this is once the era of VC-subsidized AI ends. A 10x increase in frontier model cost is an entirely reasonable outcome given that Claude code is rumored to allocate up to $5K in compute for a $200/mo plan. The losses fueling these companies is staggering and will not last.
  • cheesecompiler 6mo ago
    Rebuttal: we are yet to see this actually materialize beyond the theoretical fantasy. We have seen this with computers and internet already: the supposedly democratic technology consolidated in a few platform monopolies.
    • gradus_ad 6mo ago
      Whether or not AI consolidates (even more than now) is irrelevant. The tech is extremely useful as a catalyzer of ideas and stimulus to action.
• pbiggar 6mo ago
  The author mentions the French revolution, and that is a really important thing for the elites to understand. Class mobility -- as much as it existed because for a lot of people it didn't -- is what keeps the heads of the elites attached to their bodies. When the system gets destroyed, and when the wealthy extract all the wealth from society, a lot of desperate people start looking for reform. And when the wealthy control and limit all means of reform (buying politicians, limiting free expression on social media, etc), reformists realize the only remaining path is revolution.
• alansaber 6mo ago
  No way to approach this other than gross simplification, but we have seen generally that as technology improves, standard of living goes up. Autonomous machines breaking that trend, maybe, the only argument I find persuasive is that it makes the centralisation of power easier.
  • miltonlost 6mo ago
    > , standard of living goes up For some of humanity, perhaps. For the rest of the planet being destroyed, warmed up, bleached, demolished, turned into data centers, all this technology is destructive.
  • pylua 6mo ago
    Do you think people are happier now than they were in the 80s/90s/00s? I don’t think so, at least not in the us. Granted I was younger during those times .
    • zozbot234 6mo ago
      Yes, dramatically so. The 1980s and 1990s sucked, we live in the future.
      • kjkjadksj 6mo ago
        Look at home prices and then tell me it sucked.
        • zozbot234 6mo ago
          What home prices? There are many places (second-rate cities or rural) where home prices are just fine. Not everyone has to live in SF.
          • cheesecompiler 6mo ago
            Housing prices are not binary: they have skyrocket in every major city and city-adjacent suburb. The middle class has consistently declined since the 70s.
• sourmike 6mo ago
  The author is saying there was some kind of class mobility around the start of industrial revolution/dawn of capitalism. Which is simply false.
• miltonlost 6mo ago
  Putting "intelligence" quantifiably on a bell curve in the first sentence of the abstract is enough to toss the rest of it out
• unholyguy001 6mo ago
  Historically speaking the most reliable bridge has always been the edge of a sword
• postexitus 6mo ago
  Some good arguments - it would have been much better if it was not LLM produced slop.
• osaka2077 6mo ago
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• heliumtera 6mo ago
  >Large language models already match median professional performance on the routine tasks that constitute a large fraction of professional billing across legal research, financial analysis, software engineering, Another article that vomits 1 billion words assuming that agi had been achieved. If you have the audacity to question this claim, what value will be left from this pile of words?
• ryguz 6mo ago
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• deadbabe 6mo ago
  At work, there is little reason to ask a human a question, you just talk to AI for answers fast. Only time to talk to another human, is if you are barking down orders. This will be analogous to not hiring a human for anything an AI could do, unless you need someone to assume liability.
• rcarr 6mo ago
  The author's conclusion is fucking astonishing. Don't respond with bitterness - focus on your hobbies, friendships and love. Exactly how are people meant to do any of that exactly when, as you've just laid out, they are not going to have any ability to keep a roof over their head? > And critically: part of what made the present possible was that some of those hundred billion people pushed, slowly and painfully and often without reward, against the legal structures that governed their time. Rather than mincing words how about we state plainly how most of those pushes were made: through violence, death, and war.
• fraywing 6mo ago
  Read The Dark Enlightenment by Nick Land. My tinfoil pet conspiracy is that the billionaires know AI is going to be fundamentally incompatible with Capitalism and Democracy and are pressing the gas pedal to force us into a state of corp-state run techno-feudalism. The TL;DR to you can extrapolate from: Nick Land believes that the Catholic church was the only true exemplar of a perfect control mechanism for humanity.
• hluska 6mo ago
  Like most people I’m not sure what the future looks like, but I’ve worked with generative AI closely and none of this doom matches my experience. At its best, generative AI is faster stackoverflow driven development. At its worst, generative AI is just as slow as stackoverflow driven development was. I don’t see it replacing intelligence because frankly, you need intelligence to work with it properly otherwise intelligent people will judge you for using AI badly. On a different note though, it’s disappointing seeing a community full of such intelligent people one hundred percent taken in my either doom or hype. There’s a lot of space in the middle and while I know it’s cool to be anti capitalist now, you’ll be a lot more interesting if you go for the middle once in a while.
• advael 6mo ago
  It's possible that this is true generally, but it disproportionately affects legal, peaceful paths to power. Knowledge work is definitely not the only means to secure wealth or power through intelligence, but crucially, it is the one that currently hits the sweet spot of plausibly securing wealth and sanctioned and legal in a peaceful society. It's possible "AI" or some other technology that's been invented recently or is currently being invented closes all paths to shifts in power, but if the hype about replacing knowledge workers is to be believed, it will certainly closes the peaceful paths considerably faster, and this seems pretty bad for everyone
• pier25 6mo ago
  > Most of the traits you were born with - intelligence ... Intelligence is considered genetic now? That's quite a bold claim.
  • DustinKlent 6mo ago
    Not really a bold claim. The scientific consensus is that intelligence is a highly polygenic and heritable trait, with genetic factors accounting for 50%-80% of the variations in intelligence. The rest is environmental (prenatal care, education, nutrition, lack of exposure to toxins like lead, etc.)
    • tptacek 6mo ago
      Late to this, sorry for the necro-post, but this is not at all a consensus. The 50-80% number comes from twin studies from the 1990s and predates within-family and GXE, both of which knocked the estimates sharply back. "Highly polygenic" is probably doing the opposite of the work you're hoping it does. And, of course, "heritability" doesn't mean "genetically determined"; my propensity to wear lipstick (nil) is technically highly heritable, while my number of hands is barely heritable at all.
  • commandlinefan 6mo ago
    Well, it's a _controversial_ claim, anyway.
  • magneticnorth 6mo ago
    Well, it's certainly inheritable from your parents (50%), and recent research suggests at least 20% of the 50% heritability is genetic, according to an article in Nature Reviews Genetics. [0] [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927/
• thornewolf 6mo ago
  I noticed this article is written by AI. Have you considered adding a disclosure?
• pier25 6mo ago
  > IQ → credentials → income → heritable wealth This doesn't make much sense. Lots of people with high IQ don't have high income because they were born in the wrong country.
  • kjkjadksj 6mo ago
    Relative to the peers in their own country they usually do. Globally, yeah people get shit hands. That is why doctors leave their countries, go through the trouble to relicense and practice in the US.
    • pier25 6mo ago
      > Relative to the peers in their own country they usually do What about people born in the wrong neighbourhood or even the wrong family. I have a hard time beleiving IQ is a strong predictor of income. Anecdotally I personally know a lot of dumb people who make a lot of money and intelligent people who don't. If anything I'd say social skills are probably a better predictor of income.
      • kjkjadksj 6mo ago
        I’m not so sure wrong neighborhood/wrong family is that much of an issue in the US. There are a lot of routes out of that if you dig into athletics or schooling which higher iq people probably realize and tend to do. Even military can be a good choice. Full ride scholarships especially from marginalized backgrounds to qualified people really aren’t all that rare. Schools pride themselves on uplifting just that sort of student. And you can do military reserves and get school for free for the cost of the occasional drill, if you aren’t much of an athlete or scholar.
      • newfriend 6mo ago
        Obviously it's "on average". Of course not every single person will be ranked by their IQ. I know a 5'3" guy who played in the NBA.
• drillsteps5 6mo ago
  I actually printed this one out to give it a thorough read, something I haven't done in a while :) I'll probably comment on the author's blog later. My first reaction is that it's a bit of oversimplification, LLMs have been on the scene for what like 4 years now? I doubt the effects will be visible when you look at the data. But on the topic of inequality as a result of changes how value add is distributed between business owners and the labor - there's a very relevant book by Thomas Pickety called "Capital in the 21st century" (I believe he used the title of a similar work by another economist in 18th century on the same topic). He collected as much data as he could on income and wealth of individuals and groups for Western nations (some going back to like 17th century) and did some analysis. In a nutshell, the share of profits going towards the business owners (simplifying, inherited capital) in the West had been increasing in the 18th and the 19th century, likely due to Industrial Revolution. Which in the US culminated in extreme inequality personified in Robber Barons (Carnegie, Rockefeller and Co). It was followed by economic and financial collapse, mass unemployment, and arguably, 2 world wars. It also resulted in creating various mechanisms designed to prevent these things in the future, such as anti-trust regulations. After WWII (especially in the US) the distribution of value add between the ownership/capital and the labor changed so that the labor started getting larger and larger share, to the point that the economists declared that the capitalism solved the issue of inequality. That trend reversed around 1970s/1980s, which coincided with the invention of complex electronic computing and communication devices (and therefore inventions of the new business models). From that point on the share of profits going towards the business owners started increasing again, and that speed has been actually accelerating since the 2000s. imho at this point US is basically where we were in the end of 19th/early 20th century. The individuals' names are different, the issues (extreme monopolization/concentration of capital) are the same. LLMs and other GenAI stuff are simply part of that trend. Hopefully people at the power learned something from what happened 100+ years ago. But I kinda sorta doubt it.
• highfrequency 6mo ago
  "The window described above is not a metaphor. It is an arithmetic deadline...The window is not a metaphor for someone at your coordinates. It is a number." 9 to 1 bet that this is written by AI (perhaps proving the writer's point that he is being displaced). I think AI is great, but I wish people would just post the prompt they gave instead of the full length decompressed essay. Much more efficient information transfer!
  • DustinKlent 6mo ago
    I think that writers may stop using "It's not x, it's y" analogies in their writings because every time they do, someone calls it out for being AI. Same with "Em Dashes" and such.
  • enraged_camel 6mo ago
    I think it was AI-assisted at the very least. Nothing wrong with that, but it's always a good idea to make another pass to identify and remove LLM "tropes".
• BobbyJo 6mo ago
  HN's users are probably the most measured and considerate on the internet, and even here it is difficult to talk about things like this with any degree of nuance. Maybe that is itself a sign of the widening wealth disparity. Even smart, normally tepid, people fall into extremes when wealth is discussed.
  • deaux 6mo ago
    When the wealth disparity is extreme, discussing it in an extreme manner is not extreme, it's normal. Just like how in 1943, an allied conversation on how to massacre Axis troops as quickly and efficiently as possible, would in no way have been extreme.
  • hootz 6mo ago
    Yes, it is a sign of the widening wealth disparity. It's hard to stay moderate when your identity, security and existence is increasingly being threatened.
• keiferski 6mo ago
  A thing I've noticed with AI-written articles (like this one) is that they have a difficult time articulating their actual point. They seem to be trained on what I'll call "Gish Gallop [1] bloggers", where the intent is just to overwhelm the reader with data and arguments, so many that replying to them all in a comment would take hours. This style is especially popular amongst the chattering-about-AI-classes, hence its popularity in AI discussions. There is no thesis, no central interesting concept to discuss, and instead just charts, data, fancy economic words, and increasingly elaborate predictions. I don't think it's good writing and I don't think it's good thinking. There are many important philosophical discussions to be had about LLMs and their impact on society, but this post is just a mess. But just to respond to one point: this argument seems to fall apart if you don't assume that blue collar jobs inevitably lead to white collar jobs: * But the jobs their kids would have used to climb - the junior admin role, the data entry job, the entry-level legal assistant - those are gone first. The ladder gets removed one generation before the people who needed it were old enough to climb it. By the time the robots arrive for the physical jobs, the route up will already be closed.* First off, "by the time the robots arrive for the physical jobs" is science fiction, the mention of which really undercuts any attempt at serious thought here. But more importantly, blue collar professions are doing very well right now. If a young person from a modest background were interested in building wealth, they'd almost certainly be better off becoming an electrician today, rather than a junior admin. I see no reason why the economy can't just shift to deprioritize certain types of rote knowledge work (the only real type of work at risk of LLMs, IMO) and prioritize types of work that can't easily be automated. There is no iron law of economics that says white collar work must pay better than blue collar work. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
  • wanderingpixel 6mo ago
    > by the time the robots arrive for the physical jobs Not to mention that physical jobs in e.g. manufacturing have been highly automated by "the robots" for decades
    • DustinKlent 6mo ago
      I think he means the jobs that haven't yet been automated: plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, pipe fitters, dry wall layers, etc.
• vessenes 6mo ago
  Interesting points, made in florid style. I'd make the point a little differently, though -- in the next n years, you want to be on the side of capital. Labor is in for a really tough time. Missing from Daniel's analysis is total economic output, and I think this really matters -- when we think of Optimus launched and at scale, do we think of total GDP growing, shrinking, being stable? A lot of what someone thinks about this question will tie directly to their predictions and mental/emotional focus. I think of GDP growing - we will be turning stuff into the ground into something that works for $1/hr on all manner of tasks - we're going to be able to do a lot more stuff than we were. As Daniel points out, a company is going to own a lot (by no means all) of that economic benefit. By some miracle of our modern markets, you too could own some of that benefit, just by buying into the company. The "mercantilist labor" view is less rosy: if there's a limited amount of labor to go around then this will be directly siphoning off living wage and (to the point of the essay) excess capital that could go into building dynastic wealth. From my viewpoint, I think Daniel's charts would get a little bit less alarming for the non-dynastic scenarios if they imagined GDP increases along the way. They probably push up the sharpness of an inflection point.
  • DustinKlent 6mo ago
    Total GDP increasing isn't a good measure of economic growth or productivity because it doesn't distinguish between productive value creation and money just changing hands. If I cut your hair and charge $50 and you cut my hair and charge $50 then $100 is added to the GDP. Sure, value is created by the transaction, but value would be created if no money changed hands at all thus not even affecting the GDP! GDP can also rise even as most people are doing poorly. A billionaire buying a superyacht adds the same amount to the GDP as 500 families buying their first home. You can have a growing GDP even in a society where the top .1% have 99% of the wealth, but that's not a society I'd want to live in.
  • bayeslaw 6mo ago
    Hey thanks for reading and for leaving a considered comment. You might be right, we'll see. In my mind, GDP growing isn't really that reassuring: 1/ GDP has been growing steadily while people's happiness and overall satisfaction is flat lined or finishing (so even if this was true it won't lead to better lives lived at scale) 2/ it's more interesting to look at the ratio of labour wages / GDP. I actually make a prediction about this and that has been shrinking already. If it continues (which I think it will) even if everything grows ppl will be unhappy and unsatisfied bc a large part of our self worth is coming from comparing ourselves w the ppl around us in the wider society. This is why more equal societies tend to be happier as well.
• drivebyhooting 6mo ago
  One thing I observed recently are all of the boarded up garage attendant offices/booths. I suppose automated ticket kiosks, and security cameras have made that job redundant. But I wonder where did those employees wind up? Amazon warehouse picker? Delivery driver? The replacement job needs to be of commensurate skill and intellectual level. I’m not a believer of up skilling. Quite the contrary, it seems that education is going in the opposite direction.
• noobermin 6mo ago
  The opening paragraph bothers me greatly. "multiply a gaussian and a power law, the power law dominates." They literally are distributions of different variables, why would you "multiply" two different distributions that exist on different domains!? The example they're using as an opening is very wrong, it makes no sense and makes the author sound incompetent. Even if I get the point they're trying to make (if I try hard to find it), the very fact that they don't even know how mathematics in the "mathematical" part of their opening does not inspire confidence in the rest of the essay. It's very hard for me to move past the opening after the very first few lines! Perhaps this is just because I'm a scientist, I'm surprised no one is picking at this because I feel insane reading this and this not being the first nitpick at the top of every comment. The correct way you're represent this (dist of "life outcomes", whatever that means) is that it would be a 2D histogram with IQ and wealth on the different axes. But this is not "multiply the two" wherein "one would dominate".
  • bayeslaw 6mo ago
    Cool, I'm a scientist too w a PhD and everything, I just don't make a big deal out of it - unlike you it seems. Granted, distributions don't get multiplied, random variables do. Funnily enough the essay's actual model (log(Y) = 0.35·zIQ + 0.45·zW + ...) is additive in log space, which is multiplicative in outcome space. The preface language is loose I grant you that but the formal model that appears later is well defined. Not sure what you want to say with a 2d histogram. We are modelling, not visualizing.
• erelong 6mo ago
  I've looked forward to the destruction of the credential system as it seemed "highly unjust" and like a top barrier to people's freedom (although it hardly seemed to be talked about as such). It locked people in to specific industries or locked them out in distasteful ways. So I largely view AI in a positive light as cutting out this middle man to some extent. The process might rather be: IQ → skills → heritable wealth Unfortunately the credentialed sometimes possess skills, but at other times "merely" possess the credential (so, they may not do a good job). Other people with skills might not possess credentials today and so society forcibly prevents them from using those skills (!) at times. It will be nice if AI nudges the "system" in to accwpting more work without required credentials. Credentialing can still exist as a voluntary system and I don't per se object to that; it was more the involuntary aspects of credentials that have been off putting. (Although to some extent e en "voluntary" credentiala may not be as voluntary as there may be capital and biological constraints, as the article might get in to). This conversation about credentials might ultimately loop back to considerations of primitivism, i.e. arguments that involuntary credentials are necessary to a highly advanced technological society, and so if anyone likes "freedom", they must be more in to "primitivism" and against technology, which necessarily "enslaves" people to a credentialed system and dependence on a highly interconnected technological system. Stated otherwise: if the credentials are not optional, then our society is something of a collection of people immersed in "technological slavery", rathee than free people who might live without respect to credentials or technology.
  • jmcqk6 6mo ago
    Credentials are a way to externalize trust. The trend with AI is to further erode trust. There will be a reaction against this eventually, and it's likely that more mechanisms to externalize trust will be found, not that they will become unimportant.
    • erelong 6mo ago
      I think the problem is, compare credentials with reputation. A programmer who possesses no credentials might create "good" software that is validated as "good" even by those possessing credentials. However, a person with credentials related to programming, might produce malicious software that betrays the "trust" of the credential. Thus, just like the fallacy of the labor theory of value, credentials do not inherently relate to the production of heritable wealth. AI shines a light on this disconnect, and that actually the involuntary nature of certain credentials (as opposed perhaps to credentials themselves) creates certain classical impediments to the creation of wealth. Thus, maybe credentials might be thought to be "necessary but insufficient" for achieving certain goals or validating trust. But even in this above example, the credential was not even necessary for the production of "good" software. AI of course simply exposes this truth as it gives more direct access to skills and knowledge to the average person: the (involuntary) credential was never necessary for doing some of these things, and we are able to remove the necessity entirely in some cases.
• bayeslaw 6mo ago
  Hey HN, author here. Thanks a ton for the comments, really appreciate it. It seems like a few of you haven't really read the piece before forming your opinion on it, which is understandable, it's super long. So here's a short version: https://danielhomola.com/m%20&%20e/ai/your-bridge-to-wealth-is-being-pulled-up-tldr/ https://danielhomola.com/m%20&%20e/ai/your-bridge-to-wealth-... Re the LLM accusations: it's true that I let Claude and Gemini suggest and streamline passages. It's a long piece of text and I was struggling with the tone of it (it touches on biology, stats, history sociology and ends w a letter to my kids) - it was hard to keep it coherent and stylistically cohesive. However saying this is AI slop is absurd. I'll just leave it at that. I'll try to reply to some of the criticism individually. Thanks again!
• throwoutA556789 6mo ago
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• dahfizz 6mo ago
  > They are illustrations of a general principle: the legal inheritance channel compounds while the biological one reverts. All this pseudo-math relies on the fact that family wealth strictly compounds and does not decrease or revert to the mean. But that is not true. Economists study this, and the exact numbers differ but family wealth _does_ revert back to the mean in just a few generations. Wealth does not stay in the same family compounding forever. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/378526 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/378526 https://bnh.bank/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Heres-to-Your-Wealth-December-2022.pdf https://bnh.bank/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Heres-to-Your-We...
  • bayeslaw 6mo ago
    Fair point on the rhetoric: "no regression, no noise, just compounding" overstates it a bit. Individual family wealth does dissipate across generations. The model actually reflects this: η=0.85 inheritance fraction, threshold gating that blocks compounding below ~$20k, and a residual term that captures the noise and bad luck - which your sources are measuring. The stronger claim of the essa is different from "any given dynasty compounds forever." It's Piketty's r > g: capital returns have systematically outpaced economic growth, so the wealth class maintains and grows its share even as specific families within it churn.
• anshulbasia27 6mo ago
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• tunesmith 6mo ago
  The article says it's from first principles and looks pretty deep, and I didn't have the time to exhaustively read it myself, so I used my side project concludia to try and analyze and graph the argument... you can see the argument graph here if you're interested in that kind of thing. https://concludia.org/step/6f3cbaa2-65d4-3c44-8c1f-23f6ddf2b289 https://concludia.org/step/6f3cbaa2-65d4-3c44-8c1f-23f6ddf2b... Reading the thread below, I'm always curious where in the argument the various counterpoints would attach. Like if a counterpoint is fatal or just an offshoot. I didn't have the system try and semantically analyze it for flaws/counterpoints yet, I just tried to get it to depict the article's reasoning. Not sure yet how good a job it did.
  • swed420 6mo ago
    Cool concept. Have you considered submitting a Show HN post?
    • tunesmith 6mo ago
      haha. Nervous to. :)
      • swed420 6mo ago
        Understandable. For awhile now I've wished for a tool like this, except it would also incorporate previous discussions that match the same/similar node sentiments in order to encourage group dialogue that builds on previous discussions instead of mindlessly re-hashing them ad nauseam like you see on most platforms these days. Also, breaking points down into discrete pieces like you've done is reminiscent of the pol.is platform that vTaiwan leveraged, except theirs was pre-AI with whatever limitations that would have brought.
• Yizahi 6mo ago
  Interesting article. People are nitpicking different issues but not many are addressing the core idea, and that idea I think is sound, regardless of the coefficients picked and so on. Inequality is rapidly increasing all over the world, it is cumulative and self reinforcing (people in power using their unequal wealth to pass laws making inequality even worse). Sure, maybe median income is steadily increasing. The enormous accumulation of wealth on top would quickly render income increase meaningless. Anecdote to illustrate - just yesterday someone took a photo of a new apartment complex (so already not a luxury segment at all) with an ad on a fence "new apartments for your collection". For "collection". So they already know who their market is - wealthy guys/corpos buying housing in bulk to flip for profit or rent. Today it's an isolated joke, tomorrow it will be a standard. Same with everything else - private transportation, above average education, even knowledge work would be a prestige thing. Combine that with disillusioned poor strata electing right-wingers in hopes of solving inequality via xenophobia, but afterwards getting autocrats who are only interested in the personal enrichment and burning wealth ladder even faster, plus blocking any option to return to centrist government to preserve power (see Russia, Hungary etc.). The cumulative outcome of all of this is rather bleak. But median income will be a few percents higher, yahoo, amazing.