Hello. Thanks! I’ll take a look at the podcast you recommended.

I’m not sure the article’s proposed outcomes would meaningfully improve the welfare of the majority of people. My concern is a potential future in which AI effectively takes over the skilled labor niche, and this eliminates an important rung on the proverbial ladder low skilled workers have traditionally used to improve their social and economic status.

Nobody likes being stuck in a dead end job, and the outcome the article proposes (at least, the more pessimistic parts of the forecast) sounds like the majority of the population effectively trapped in a pre-determined economic caste with little to no meritocratic means of escape.

That doesn’t read as an improvement in welfare to me, it sounds like being reduced to chattel.

Regardless of the paper’s conclusion, the proposed trajectory it outlines suggests that most people will be reduced to menial, unskilled labor with no means of improvement since AI would then form a seemingly insurmountable barrier to economic escape from what is effectively a lower class. The middle class is eliminated, and the upper class (the AI owners) are now insulated from meritocratic displacement via a de facto “divine right” of AI ownership.

This is Feudalism, isn’t it?