Ed Elson

Rich people.

Yes, it turns out when you ask Americans if they think AI will do more harm than good, and you categorize them by income, the only demographic group whose majority believes it will be a net positive for society are people who make more than $200,000 per year.

Meanwhile, among people who make less than $100,000, only a third believe it will be a net positive.

And then among people who make less than $50,000, only a quarter believe it will be a net positive.

In other words, how you feel about AI is almost directly proportional to how much money you make.

If you make a lot of money, you feel good about it.

And if you don't, you feel bad.

And the question is, why?

Well, to us, the answer is quite obvious, and that is that AI stands to make rich people very rich and keep poor people probably poor.

This isn't really conjecture.

This is based on what we already know.

Since ChapGPT was released in 2022, the top 1%, which owns half of the entire stock market, has added a collective $15 trillion to their net worth.

Meanwhile, the bottom 40% of Americans who don't own stocks haven't seen any of those gains, and their electric bills have risen 17%, in part because of the extraordinary energy consumption of data centers.

Now, we've talked a lot about the AI industry's popularity problem and how that might or might not have led to the violent attacks on Sam Altman last week, but I would argue that all of this isn't so much about Sam Altman or OpenAI or AI at all,

When you get down to it, all of this is about wealth inequality.

And the proof is clearly in the polling.

I talk more about this in my latest edition of my newsletter, Simply Put, which is out today.

You can read it at simplyput.profgmedia.com.

Okay, that's it for today.

This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss, edited by Joel Patterson, and engineered by Benjamin Spencer.