So there's a long NYT piece out about how Silicon Valley privately thinks about AI and labor, and most of the discourse around it has focused on the OpenAI/Anthropic policy posturing stuff. That's fine but I think everyone is burying the lede.
The scary part is the permanent underclass framing. There's a closing window to accumulate enough capital before AI + robotics can fully substitute human labor. Once that threshold is crossed, class positions get frozen. The rich deploy superintelligent machines to compound their wealth. Everyone else is structurally unemployable and lives on welfare scraps.
This is the ambient private vibe among the people actually building the systems. The engineers, the VCs, the founders. They say something rosier on the record and then tell you the real view when the mic is off.
The policy stuff in the piece is mostly depressing. OpenAI's white paper reads like a Bernie Sanders platform (32-hour workweek! public wealth fund! tax the rich!) written by a company that simultaneously killed its profit cap and funded a PAC against a pro-regulation candidate. Anthropic is more intellectually honest but when pressed on whether they'll actually lobby for any of this, their co-founder described policy advocacy as "the end of a very, very long chain of work."
A federal jobs guarantee apparently polls really well when framed around AI displacement specifically. 2028 is going to be a very strange election.
Posted by MightExpress4873