I mean this is basically the foundation of any cyberpunk novel. You don't need to read that far ... just look at the works of Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Philip K. Dick and Richard Morgan.
From Neuromancer and Snow Crash to Altered Carbon the theme is that technology is not salvation but as another axis of inequality.
The majority of households in the US have no savings of any kind and rural suicide rates have jumped by nearly 50% in the last 25 years. Y'all have just about backed everyone into a corner already.
How much of this is a cultural problem with Americans though?
Immigrant families save a higher percentage than Americans even when they make less money. Americans notoriously overconsume and are not big on saving.
This is obvious and not an insight. The question is if people like the executives of Blackrock will agree to be taxed more heavily, to draw regulations to make competition more fair to small business, etc. Right now I don’t see anything useful happening.
Until housing is solved the wealth divide will continue to grow whether ai lives up to expectations or not. Higher wealth taxing funding UBI etc. will be largely ineffective without solving housing.
All this new fangled talk about ABUNDANCE yadda yadda I find quite silly. We already live in abundance, most jobs for instance already pay very livable wages for example. It's just not livable because of mainly housing (& more broadly renting & land prices)
The abundance idea is quite interesting in that in the near future we may have an abundance of most stuff people want including healthcare, nice food cars etc. produced partly with AI and robots. At the moment we still need people to make stuff hence the capitalist system continues.
I agree housing is an issue but we are not at the stage where they can say everyone have a house and take a holiday.
I know this is a classic boogeyman, but while large institutional investors are highly visible, they don’t own much of the residential real estate market or contribute to price changes in any meaningful way.
Large institutional investors own < 1% of single family homes and < 3% of single family rentals.
20% of US single family homes are investor owned at all, and 85% of those are held by mom‑and‑pop with <= 5 properties.
It’s retail investors that are pushing up the market for other retail buyers.
Well of course. The whole point of AI is devalue human intelligence (one of the last things someone can use to pull themselves up by their bootstraps) in favor of something a rich guy can buy more than you can imagine with money.
If I need money, and you have money, there are only two ways I can get money from you (ignoring charity):
1. By giving you something worth more than money to you.
2. By promising that giving money to me will make you richer, earning you more than you gave me. (A loan, a business investment, etc.)
The richer you are, the fewer things there in category 1 that I could plausibly deliver. I probably can't get away with lying to you in category 2 for long, so going that way may save me today, but it will make you richer.
Without redistribution of some sort, wealth concentrates, and wealth concentration probably even accelerates. No AI needed. That's just the interesting flavor it takes these days.
There are plenty of inventors that made more money than the capital providers. Nearly every founder (Jobs, Zuck, Musk, Google Guys, Gates) all made more wealth than the investors that bought in along the way.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 37.9 ms ] threadFrom Neuromancer and Snow Crash to Altered Carbon the theme is that technology is not salvation but as another axis of inequality.
Immigrant families save a higher percentage than Americans even when they make less money. Americans notoriously overconsume and are not big on saving.
And if you dont want to read, here is the hourlong audio: https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/larry...
Those looking for a deep explanation, this isnt as much about AI as it is about societal participation in prosperity.
All this new fangled talk about ABUNDANCE yadda yadda I find quite silly. We already live in abundance, most jobs for instance already pay very livable wages for example. It's just not livable because of mainly housing (& more broadly renting & land prices)
I agree housing is an issue but we are not at the stage where they can say everyone have a house and take a holiday.
Large institutional investors own < 1% of single family homes and < 3% of single family rentals.
20% of US single family homes are investor owned at all, and 85% of those are held by mom‑and‑pop with <= 5 properties.
It’s retail investors that are pushing up the market for other retail buyers.
https://thedailyrecord.com/2025/07/08/investor-homebuying-hi...
https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/institutional-i...
1. By giving you something worth more than money to you.
2. By promising that giving money to me will make you richer, earning you more than you gave me. (A loan, a business investment, etc.)
The richer you are, the fewer things there in category 1 that I could plausibly deliver. I probably can't get away with lying to you in category 2 for long, so going that way may save me today, but it will make you richer.
Without redistribution of some sort, wealth concentrates, and wealth concentration probably even accelerates. No AI needed. That's just the interesting flavor it takes these days.