As a wise graduating class once said in 2026, “Booooooooooooooo!”. They were hollering at some executive, or some other kind of powerful figure after said figure inevitably started talking about AI during a commencement speech.

I don’t think the difference in sentiment on AI between the San Francisco tech bros and the rest of the world is really understood in either place, or maybe it’s just a different attitude.

Whether you think your startup will propel you out of the inevitable permanent underclass, or your water pressure just dropped tenfold due to a new datacenter taking your water (and making you pay for it), the fear is an undeniable undertone of any discussion of AI, at least among the working class.

And don’t get me wrong, this is undoubtably a class thing. AI represents the devaluation of the worker and a direct threat to the livelihoods of millions. If you are skeptical of AI or AGI and believe our jobs are safe, great news. The stock market collapse resulting from that conclusion will all but zero your retirement savings and throw us into another 2008 scale recession.

Soon, Elon will IPO SpaceX. He is looking for bagholders for his unsound business. If you own index funds, you will be one of them. And you better hope SpaceX won’t go to the moon, because if it does your retirement is fine but all knowledge workers will lose the means of production and be forced to rent superintelligence from oligarchs if they wish to be economically productive.

I work on AI research as a day job. How come I just wrote an essay seemingly calling AI the greatest transfer of wealth and power away from the working class in recent memory?

The reason is that I want to call out how few counterarguments we have ready for this. Our marketers try to sell ~~people~~ businesses on productivity gains, funny image generations, and cringeslop movies about dead dogs. They hype investors with ever more astronomical capital expenditures.

One could argue that their mission was to normalize AI, normalize layoffs, normalize suffering, and make AI look inevitable and powerful more than palatable to the unwashed masses. That might be true. I’m not sure it’s the right approach to antagonize the entire working class on purpose.

There is a pitch for AI which is not hostile to the workers, to the artists, and to Gen Z who are more lost than ever in an economy and job market stacked so far against them that home ownership seems about as plausible as a president under retirement age.

That pitch describes the elimination of busywork, the massive acceleration of creativity, and the new meritocracy of authorship.

In the ancient year of 2017, a great designer could only bring their vision to life by paying an engineer or by getting a company to pay an engineer (and take their IP in the process). Today, they are one session of ${coding agnet du jour} away from making a compelling demo which can get buy-in and become a product.

Musicians can make synthesizers and filters like Linus Torvalds did. Photographers can finally make sense of their backlogs and play with image processing (see: me). Painters can vibe up their own procreate killer like AmberPaint.

Developers once held the means of production in their IDE, having more leverage over their bosses than almost any other profession we can think of, resulting in some of the best work conditions people have seen. Now, every creative person with an idea owns a much more valuable means of production. There is no more nepokid CEO gatekeeping the engineers from the upstart visionaries. If you believe you idea is awesome, go build it, you have no excuse.

Not all is rosy, all the fears I wrote about above are real and valid, but this silver lining is true as well. Even if OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic collude to enshittify AI and deny us access to the best models, we can still do this on Deepseek, Kimi, or Qwen. Maybe someone can download LLama to make the Zuck’s day.

Maybe the way to escape the permanent underclass is not to grind out another B2B AI SAAS in record time, but to have the one thing the AI and most of the capital holders don’t : good ideas, clear vision, and willingness to build.