If you follow AI news, or general tech and business news, your timeline and inbox may likely be flooded soon with one image – a photo of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei refusing to hold hands on stage at the India AI Impact Summit in a kumbaya photo-op.
I’m very scared that US culture and society broadly isn’t ready for the AI changes that are coming, and much of this is due to them not being carried along by the previous two decades of tech’s massive, narrowly shared, wealth creation. Likely the hardest problem to solve today, and is needed.
Another part of the problem is that AI is even more asymmetric about sharing the wealth benefits than previous industrial technologies. Companies that are investing $100 billion plus in building out AI tech will likely concentrate wealth even narrower than the current platform companies ...
Great piece. The globalization parallel is sharp, and I think it might actually be worse this time. Globalization at least had a story about how the benefits would eventually spread: cheaper goods, rising living standards, new markets. It took decades for people to realize the rerouting wasn't happening on its own. With AI, the concentration is visible from day one. Everyone can see that the same few companies are building the infrastructure, training the models, and capturing the value. The "diffused benefits, concentrated costs" pattern isn't a bug that better messaging can fix. It's structural.
Which is maybe why the "learn to hold hands" ending left me wanting more. History shows that this kind of concentration doesn't get reversed by optics or retraining programs. It gets reversed by structural shifts that reroute the gains, new institutions, new rules, new paths that bypass the old gatekeepers. Those shifts eventually show up, but rarely gently.
I’m very scared that US culture and society broadly isn’t ready for the AI changes that are coming, and much of this is due to them not being carried along by the previous two decades of tech’s massive, narrowly shared, wealth creation. Likely the hardest problem to solve today, and is needed.
Indeed
Another part of the problem is that AI is even more asymmetric about sharing the wealth benefits than previous industrial technologies. Companies that are investing $100 billion plus in building out AI tech will likely concentrate wealth even narrower than the current platform companies ...
Great piece. The globalization parallel is sharp, and I think it might actually be worse this time. Globalization at least had a story about how the benefits would eventually spread: cheaper goods, rising living standards, new markets. It took decades for people to realize the rerouting wasn't happening on its own. With AI, the concentration is visible from day one. Everyone can see that the same few companies are building the infrastructure, training the models, and capturing the value. The "diffused benefits, concentrated costs" pattern isn't a bug that better messaging can fix. It's structural.
Which is maybe why the "learn to hold hands" ending left me wanting more. History shows that this kind of concentration doesn't get reversed by optics or retraining programs. It gets reversed by structural shifts that reroute the gains, new institutions, new rules, new paths that bypass the old gatekeepers. Those shifts eventually show up, but rarely gently.