The capability is definitely there, the agency or education probably isn't. Those are both personal and infrastructure choices. None of those are tech issues.

Most people predict Citizens United will cause some kind of upheaval eventually. Maybe AI will be the thing that finally causes it, but if you ban that, it'll just be something else, proving my point its not a natural result of the technology but more a matter of all that is happened so far.

Could capital owners try to capture it all? I'm sure. But it's not a natural result of the technology, it's just whether we choose to allow it or not.

>>” to scale your wealth with other people's labor”

Or you can scale your labor with openly available AI?

Either way, I empathize with your anxiety but posit that its primarily driven by techs original sin: the algorithmic feed and the resultant 24hour news cycle. I think the truth will be a lot more boring (mass upskilling and reskilling) but those narratives aren’t easily sold on the feeds.

AI is normal technology but it’s probably the largest upgrade to productivity and massively deflationary especially as it hits atoms and not just bits. That is actually extremely exciting.

Surely, on Hackernews, we know we can get excited about technology that maybe boring to most of the public. And in this case, I think the technology has wide-ranging productivity enhancing applications

Maybe your question is about why the tech billionaires are trying to get the public so excited about it? Totally different question.

>> It will still be same 8 hours of doing something

Yes but your 8 hours of work will serve more people. Will you see the fruits of that productivity gain? Very good question, but again, orthogonal to the usefulness of the technology.

This is true only in the headlines and the loud CEO pronouncements that we for some reason take at face value. In the numbers it's almost more boring than the industrial revolution. A "white collar reshuffling" [1] the industrial revolution was not.

[1]: https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/08/05/q2-labor-market-outlook...

I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict, but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers.

No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about going to work to make sure we can do more with less tomorrow than we can do today.

[1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

I think AI folks have done a terrible job of communicating this, but replacing a professional simply isn't the point. The point is to serve all the situations where people would've never considered hiring a professional, and where perfection or artistic merit isn't the point (say a personal throwaway recreation of an LOTR world).

And I think in that regard the benchmarks are pretty good.

The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1]. So, I don't think this is true :(.

We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.

[1]: https://medium.com/@dtxtransitposts/how-much-does-it-actuall...

I agree we can do a lot better. And I have no moral qualms about giving the excess away to everyone who needs it. But I need people to admit that it will require a lot of work till we can sufficiently claim we have a real realizable "excess".

And that work requires the current system to work more "efficiently" and with "higher productivity", in the economic definition of the word, not as a personal valuation as OP defines.

[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.

How are you measuring this? Hopefully something better than stock prices.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE

As always, yes I know this already exists in Japan.

Ecosystems are either too fragmented or too monopolistic. Complain, complain, complain. Speaking of monopolistic, just google it guys, google knows where the movies/shows stream, that is your unified interface.

No it is not. The feed is optimized for what will increase the intensity of feelings, and bad feelings are more easily optimized than good. Meta (patient zero for this nonsense) has pretty much said so, multiple times.

" more a result of the environment than algorithms"

What environment? People are sitting on their algorithms for 100x more time than any physical environment.

The level to which our algorithmic feeds have made us so confidently wrong about things is so deeply problematic. Tech's original sin keeps biting us back. This rampant cynicism and nihilism borne from constant bombardment of headlines has us acting like we know the personal stories of all leadership all around the world, and it's deeply damaging to our trust in the system.

Plenty of Ivy League leaders quietly working away at their job, doing the best they can with great results and no one to write about them and you'll never hear about it anywhere. This is obvious to anyone on a second thought, but the first reactionary thought is what's acted on...always.

Is this not..Libre?

An Eames chair is, we just have a really high bar for what is copyrightable in the physical world, and it seems pointlessly discriminatory.