There's a simple pattern that repeats through history. In every era, there's one industry (or a few) where technology creates massive efficiency gains — agriculture once, then railroads and factories, then computers and the internet, and now AI. Governments and central banks pour money into whatever that industry is at the time, because it drives growth. That's fiscal and monetary policy doing what they're supposed to do.
The problem is who's standing closest to that money when it gets created. It's almost always the same 1% — people who already own land, already own factories, already own capital. They get first access. Prices of the assets they hold go up. And by the time that new money works its way down to regular incomes, it mostly shows up as inflation — higher prices, same salary.
Look at what's happened just since 2008. Central banks around the world pumped an enormous amount of new money into the system to prevent collapse. That money went into banks, stocks, real estate, bonds — assets owned by people who already had assets. Wages didn't move nearly as much. The gap between people who own things and people who work for a living got wider, not narrower.
Right now, we're in the AI era, and the same pattern is playing out again, just at a faster pace and a bigger scale. Trillions are being spent building out AI infrastructure. Whoever is positioned near that buildout — investors, asset owners, early builders — stands to benefit enormously. Everyone else risks getting priced out on one side, and replaced on the other, as AI and robotics start doing the jobs people used to get paid for.
That's economic irrelevance. Not that you'll starve — we're moving toward a world of abundance, and there will be safety nets. But you'll lose the ability to earn real, dignified income through your own work and skill. And once that happens, you lose your say in how anything gets decided.