The entire US economy is currently being propped up by growth in the AI/tech sector. And I am convinced that LLMs are fundamentally incapable of delivering on the promises being made by the AI CEOs. That means there is a massive bubble that will eventually burst, probably taking the whole US economy with it.
Let’s say, for sake of argument, that I am a typical American. I work a job for a wage, but I’m mostly living paycheck to paycheck. I have maybe a little savings, and a retirement account with a little bit in it, but certainly not enough that I can retire anytime in the near future.
To what extent is it possible for someone like me, who doesn’t buy into the AI hype, to insulate themselves from the negative impact of the eventual collapse?
Why?
I highly doubt your homelessness stat. If it is at an all time high by any metric, it is almost certainly a statistical artifact from (1) increased homelessness in developed nations, where tracking is decent and (2) improved tracking in developing nations. Meanwhile the people who can’t afford “basic necessities” are, again, in developed nations - places where the notion of what constitutes basic necessities would be considered grand opulance in many parts of developing nations.
Instead, the majority of people in the world have seen improvements to their quality of life over the past 20, 40, and 60 years. Improved water and sanitation systems, more robust and resiliant food systems, greater access to life saving medical care, huge drops in infant mortality, hugely increased access to technology and education.
This is, quite frankly, a ridiculous fantasy. The wealth of the top 1% primarily exists not in vaults of gold bars, but in the ownership of what are intangible human constructs. Particular segments of land (lines on a map); businesses (organized structures of people); intellectual property (literally just ideas).
Elon Musk, for example, has a large portion of his wealth in Tesla. Of course, Tesla has physical assets in its factories and such. But most of the value of the company is speculative - people expecting Tesla to be wildly successful in the future. The next part of its value comes from IP - the exclusive ownership of its various inventions and innovations. And another part comes from the organizational structure itself and the knowledge and intelligence of the individuals who make up that structure. At its root, the value of Tesla is the goose that lays the golden eggs (Musk’s cult of personality and the expertise of the individuals that make up the business) and investor confidence that the goose will continue laying golden eggs. In your glorious revolution, presumably Musk will be beheaded, and all the Tesla employees will scatter to the far winds as the proletariat storms their offices. Without the stable interaction of these technical experts, no more innovation happens, and investor confidence dries up (assuming the investors weren’t also beheaded). The wealth of Tesla, then, does not go to the people, but goes up in smoke.
A revolution premised purely on taking assets from the rich has a predictable ending: in the slim chance that the revolution succeeds, even if the tangible wealth is equally distributed to the people (also a slim chance), the engine that generated that wealth has been destroyed and, deprived of the ability to generate new wealth, the people eventually spend away their windfall and are left with less than they had before they started. This sort of phenomenon was literally the impetus for Adam Smith to write The Wealth of Nations. Spain had spent a couple centuries robbing the Americas of its gold via murder and slavery - enough to literally collapse the price of gold in Europe. And yet, during Smith’s time, Spain was in dire financial straights while England was the world’s predominant economic power. Why? Because England had invested in technology and had developed industrial factories. It had invested in public and private institutions (ie, structures of people) that would continuously generate new wealth, rather than relying on hoarding gold bars.
The “glorious revolution” fantasy, meanwhile, is largely counterproductive to the actual goal of improving normal people’s lives and improving the equality of political and economic power, because it plays into the childish notion that if we just throw a big enough temper tantrum, then we will get our way. And maybe that might be true for a brief moment. It is certainly true for some children some of the time that if they yell and scream and cry enough, they will be given the ice cream they want. But they only get that ice cream because there is an adult there, listening to them cry, who has a job that makes money that they can then use to buy the ice cream. The problem is that, ice cream or not, at the end of the day the child is still a child, completely dependent on the adult to provide for all their needs and make all their important descisions. The child gains real autonomy in their lives not when they throw “The Glorious Temper Tantrum” - they gain it when they get a job outside the purview of their caregivers and are able to spend the money they make at that job on the things of their own choosing.
So, too, with average people growing out of the controlling influence of the political and economic elite. Independence is achieved via building things - communities, relationships, physical infrastructure, businesses, governments, unions - which can be relied on instead of the options presented to us by the elites. And building things takes time and effort. It doesn’t happen overnight with a few molotovs and a good photo op - that’s the narrative the elites want you to believe, the one they put in all the popular movies and tv shows, because it is the strategy that is absolutely sure to fail. The idea that The Great Battle will be followed by Happily Ever After serves the elites because it tells us that we will win when we just put in a reasonable amount of effort right at the very last moment, and then we can relax. This is not how the world works. No - the world gets better when people put in unreasonable amounts of effort right now to gradually improve things and build things bit by bit, and keep putting in that effort for years and years and years. Sure, maybe there will someday be a tipping point or a big marker in history that we can point to and say “ah, that’s when things changed”. But make no mistake - that moment can only happen, and will only lead to a better world after the fact, because of the long term, boring hard work of people who care more about building things to help their friends than destroying things to hurt their enemies.