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Sub 1% of the planet has access to cutting edge frontier AI.

Sub 1% of the planet has any practical use for the top tiers of AI systems. That will likely always be true.

The gap between the haves and have nots will drastically widen further, and very quickly. The bottom ~95-97% will be left behind in a way that will be impossible to overcome. The age of AI + robotics will just make it that much harder to climb for most people, these are systems that are in aggressive, direct competition with human labor. And in short order the AI + robots will be vastly superior to human labor (it doesn't really matter if we're speaking in terms of 10 years or 30 years).

AI will consolidate the winnings. The gigantic gains by the elite rich related to AI over the past few years, is merely a hint of what's to come. Capital will win as it always does.

There will be some gains for most everybody else, those gains will be comparatively trivial though. A house bot that saves people an hour of labor here and there, AI that automates some trivial life tasks.

AI has no money, it has no wealth, it owns no capital. For now. If you want to avoid the brutal human vs AI/robot competition arena: own capital, own the AI, own the robots.

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Is this substantiated right now in any real way? Is there any existing gap between the barista who doesn't care about AI and the person working at anthropic who has access to internal models? Or the person with 3 $200 subscriptions?

Maybe money? They can make websites for people? What gap really exists between these people besides earning potential, which already existed before AI.

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The existing gap gets made worse by AI concentrating wealth even further to the owners of the assets that are producing via AI. AI will generate intense wealth from productivity gains, and those new gains will be more concentrated than any other economic round we've seen previously. It's a human labor eliminator the likes of which we have never run into before.

Fewer humans will be needed per dollar of output. Those gains will not go to labor, they will go to capital, the capital that owns the data centers, the factories, the stores, et al.

In the physical space (AI + robotics) it'll be a chaotic, slow'ish moving change, slower than the hypsters are predicting now, but it will happen regardless.

That barista job largely won't exist in the future. China will replace them with $3,000 bots with high-functioning AI software, and they definitely won't be powered by expensive Nvidia GPUs.

Slow changing service & manufacturing spaces will see a high wipe out ratio in terms of human labor being eliminated.

Walmart has 2.1 million employees, most are doing repetitive tasks that require modest levels of intelligence. If they could eliminate one million of those with AI + robotics, for a cost of less than ~$15,000 per year, they'd do it immediately. It's hard to imagine a future where that isn't going to happen. That human labor pool is costing Walmart probably $80-$100 billion per year. Amazon is even more forthright in their desperation to remove the humans from retail.

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