You describe the impact of AI on work well - albeit with a negative framing. As the son of a union organizer Mom I see work as a necessary evil and leisure time (less working hours) as a goal. The middle class will disappear but if this plays out as it should all classes will wither away. ‘Abundance’ means for everybody.
So I want the end of the middle class.
The key is how to find and enjoy free time (choice)?
Society will prosper and civilization will be richer if we can agree what to do with the abundance. That isn’t a technology question, it’s a political and economic question.
I believe that things will turn out (eventually) for the best if we realize there's a Doom Loop. Some businesses are already realizing (the hard way) that AI is not a silver bullet.
You're right that it is not really a technology problem but a political one, and I would also add cultural. We need more support for the trades (in the US anyway).
The power crunch prediction is the one that will reshape the entire edge AI landscape. When centralized compute becomes constrained by energy and chip supply, the economic gravity shifts to distributed inference at the edge -- and that requires a fundamentally different infrastructure stack. Every IoT fleet operator I talk to is already hitting this: you can't backhaul all your sensor data to the cloud when bandwidth costs scale linearly with device count. The companies that win the abundance race will be the ones that push intelligence to the edge while maintaining fleet-wide coordination through lightweight connectivity fabrics -- eSIM orchestration, model compression pipelines, and OTA governance frameworks that can update thousands of edge nodes without downtime. The mini-Lehman scenario for AI is real and it's a concentration risk in infrastructure, not just models.
Your take on AI agents unlocking abundance hits hard—but Musk's 'work optional' ignores cognitive ceilings locking most out. My Doom Loop math: 91% can't reskill to elite roles. Brutal cycle ahead. Dive in: https://drcurtrasmussen.substack.com/p/the-interface-on-substack-special?r=70hgea. Thoughts on collab?
You describe the impact of AI on work well - albeit with a negative framing. As the son of a union organizer Mom I see work as a necessary evil and leisure time (less working hours) as a goal. The middle class will disappear but if this plays out as it should all classes will wither away. ‘Abundance’ means for everybody.
So I want the end of the middle class.
The key is how to find and enjoy free time (choice)?
Society will prosper and civilization will be richer if we can agree what to do with the abundance. That isn’t a technology question, it’s a political and economic question.
I believe that things will turn out (eventually) for the best if we realize there's a Doom Loop. Some businesses are already realizing (the hard way) that AI is not a silver bullet.
You're right that it is not really a technology problem but a political one, and I would also add cultural. We need more support for the trades (in the US anyway).
The power crunch prediction is the one that will reshape the entire edge AI landscape. When centralized compute becomes constrained by energy and chip supply, the economic gravity shifts to distributed inference at the edge -- and that requires a fundamentally different infrastructure stack. Every IoT fleet operator I talk to is already hitting this: you can't backhaul all your sensor data to the cloud when bandwidth costs scale linearly with device count. The companies that win the abundance race will be the ones that push intelligence to the edge while maintaining fleet-wide coordination through lightweight connectivity fabrics -- eSIM orchestration, model compression pipelines, and OTA governance frameworks that can update thousands of edge nodes without downtime. The mini-Lehman scenario for AI is real and it's a concentration risk in infrastructure, not just models.