I just had chatgpt draw a table of wealth distribution by year based on best data sources it can find.
It shows that inequality has been on the rise from year 0 (top 1% has 45% of wealth) all the way until WW1 - top 1% had 65% in 1910. It then drops to 45% again post WW2 and has been on the rise since. 2026 shows top 1% own 62-63%.
What is interesting is, the bottom 50% has never been poorer. The table starts from 3% for bottom 50% and fluctuates between 1.8 and 5 all the way until 1970 (5%) which marks the beginning of a sharp decline. Today, bottom 50% has 1% of the wealth -a historical low- while the top 1% is almost at a historical high. The wealth distribution has never been more unequal.
Obviously the total wealth kept increasing and an average person today would have much more than an average person at any point in history, but people usually compare themselves with others alive today, not others who lived 100 years ago.
There being more $10+ billionaires doesn't make your life worse when you are earning 50% more on a real dollar basis than you would have been 50 years ago.
Exactly. And this is why ideas like post-scarcity or universal-high-income are not realistic. Because we can already make life heaven on earth for everyone alive. But we won't. Not because we do not have the resources or means of production, but because we do not have the willingness and systems in place. If we do not fix these first, AI-abundance will bring more suffering, not more prosperity.
We should fix this and feed, house, and cloth everyone. We should create the systems so people are taken care of, and critical mass of people have enough culture and education and good incentives so it sustains. Once we know we can do this and the culture and the systems are irrevocably change in humans' favour, we should then look at AI-abundance.
Just learn, sure. But the difference between my efficiency of using it on my day 2 and month 6 is significant. Yet I feel I am barely scratching the surface of it.
I’ll take it over whatever Luddite fucking nonsense the progressives have going on right now. I’m a progressive and will fight whatever short term nonsense perspective vociferously. It’s progressive because it’s forward looking, not some regressive bullshit like we have now.
Billionaires are the ones making paradigm shifting progress because they are the only ones that can afford it. I’m all for taxing billionaires but not understanding how paradigm shifts have worked in the US for 80 years you’re just going on gut feel not evidence.
My guess is that if they take down the public hosting, most clients would lose access to work they paid for and fiverr has no way to put these back behind an authorisation. It is just a public list of files, either everyone has access to your file, or do not, including you.
My guess is that there is literally no one there who knows how to fix this. Seriously, look through the proposed solutions here, plenty of devs wouldn't know how to do any of them. It might not even be possible, with their architecture, to fix it quickly and retain functionality. I have worked in a place full of noobs where I'm certain none of the devs including me would have the first idea how to fix something like this.
Because success is individual, inequality is statistical.
It ia true that AI gives ordinary people a lot more chance to be successful.
But do not forget that success depends on lots of factors that are not in one’s control: knowing the right people, time being right for what you are doing, and lots of others. So while the mechanics of success is a lot different to lottery, it does not work much differently: 1 in 1M attempts are successful.
Yes, AI gives everyone more lottery tickets, but it gives rich people a lot more tickets.
I would rather you did not do that. You would create a shit tone more global transfer of goods accelerating global warming, and make societies dependant on unsustainable dirt cheap production practices.
Even if yourself could argue that you’ve done a good thing overall, I’d rather not take your word on that and would rather not have you decide something so extremely impactful.
Except for commercial flights (which I would easily give up for a hopeful society), I do not find anything on your list remotely relevant to my happiness or well-being.
Imported cheap goods are obviously something all of us consume a lot, but we only need them to feel good in comparison to our neighbours.
As long as we keep them for hospitals and medicine, the rest going away would be just fine. Children would play with whatever they can find instead of cheap plastic toys, we would have to learn to multi-purpose our tools instead of having a specific object for every minor purpose.
That's an absurd statement. By your logic, you can't just say that we have the smallpox vaccine "because of Edward Jenner". Because you would also "have to prove we could not do it without Edward Jenner". What does that even mean??
I can’t elaborate on your example as I’m not very knowledge-able on the smallpox vaccine bit that depends on how close we were to inventing the vaccine anyway - I’ll take your word on we were not and Edward Jenner had a revolutionary advancement. Then we can say we have the vaccine thanks to him.
But when it comes to space technology, if it was possible to produce the same technology by targeting the required technology directly, we can’t say it was because of war only because some of the inventions of war were re-used. It eould be like saying we have a 45th president thanks to Trump - it would be absurd as we’d have a 45th president anyway.
So I do not think there is enough grounds to attribute this mission’s success to war - with some of the war’s budget, NASA could have invented the required technology anyway.
It shows that inequality has been on the rise from year 0 (top 1% has 45% of wealth) all the way until WW1 - top 1% had 65% in 1910. It then drops to 45% again post WW2 and has been on the rise since. 2026 shows top 1% own 62-63%.
What is interesting is, the bottom 50% has never been poorer. The table starts from 3% for bottom 50% and fluctuates between 1.8 and 5 all the way until 1970 (5%) which marks the beginning of a sharp decline. Today, bottom 50% has 1% of the wealth -a historical low- while the top 1% is almost at a historical high. The wealth distribution has never been more unequal.
Obviously the total wealth kept increasing and an average person today would have much more than an average person at any point in history, but people usually compare themselves with others alive today, not others who lived 100 years ago.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a0b9a2a-4c6c-8394-8a66-7f86c510c8...
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