While awaiting the results of the election my thoughts turned to the next battle facing America and technology.
That is the question of who will benefit from AI?
Right now, I am a big winner. The wealth of AI is going to investors. If you own Amazon.com, Nvidia, Google or Microsoft, or especially if you own Palantir, you’re a winner.
The individuals who control these companies are achieving fortunes of unbelievable size. Elon Musk, for instance, now has a net worth equal to half the GDP of his native South Africa. The 10 richest Americans are each worth $100 billion, or more. While Musk remains in the labor force, most are just sitting on their assets, like the “Google guys,” now worth about $140 billion each.
These fortunes are like gold in vaults. They represent vast potential energy, the ability to reshape the world. Wall Street tells us, confidently and with little evidence, that this will all trickle down somehow.
But will it? The CEO of Perplexity, now raising money at an $8 billion valuation, just offered to break a strike by New York Times’ tech staff, which is seeking a 2.5% raise and wants to resist Return to Office mandates. (He now claims to have been misunderstood.)
This is the “let them eat cake” attitude of Marc Andreessen, the Netscape creator turned VC (backing Perplexity among other things), who values people entirely on their net economic worth. He thinks this is idealism, that any impediment to this makes us less than a free market.
A victory by Trump today would benefit Andreessen, Musk and (frankly) me as well. An economy controlled entirely by shareholders benefits shareholders, not workers and certainly not consumers.
But this is unsustainable.
The Coming Economy
The last few years have seen poorer people doing a little better, relative to the rich. Wages are up, and jobs are plentiful, while the ultra-rich have just spent billions convincing tens of millions just the opposite is the case.
There are big problems in the U.S. economy. Housing costs too much for my kids, who are still living with me well into their 30s. Education is becoming unaffordable, in a country where facts and even coursework are available free online. (The problem lies in getting the credential, or even being allowed to learn in state-sponsored madrasas.)
But any move to address these problems, or the environmental disasters AI is bringing due to Nvidia ignoring Moore’s Law, is going to be fought tooth-and-nail by the ultra-rich, and even by most investors.
Issues of labor rights, of tax and spending policy, are now going to take center stage. The people on that stage will determine the direction, but even if they’re pointing in the right way the ultra-rich, and their VC enablers, aren’t going to meekly surrender. They’re going to call the rest of us communist or worse. They’re going to claim we’re giving up America’s advantages to Europe, to China, or to India.
But if the purpose of AI, of technology, and of wealth isn’t to benefit the mass of people, it has no value. If the ultra-rich act only in their own interest, as they did in the 1920s, they will set in motion their own destruction, a second great leveling marked by poverty and war.
