I keep seeing people in my feed say that this or that is solved or cooked and there is a certain glee to it that I cannot shake because it is not a neutral description of progress and it celebrates obsolescence in a way that feels personal and I started looking at the people posting this and I realized the same people cheering are often the same people being priced out of the thing they are cheering for and I started wondering if this is really a class thing and not a technology thing because the people cheering have a cushion that absorbs the impact of what they are celebrating and they have a government and a safety net that half the world does not and science has always had a blind spot for the people at the bottom and to even be in this conversation you had to have had the means to get an education in the first place. The original promise of AI was that it would solve big problems like climate and disease but that has quietly shifted to a simpler goal which is replacing labour because even the most exploited people had one piece of leverage which was being needed and the people running these companies keep announcing that this leverage no longer counts for anything and the venture capitalists say in five years this and that will be solved and they say it with the confidence of people who have never had to worry about what being solved means for them. What happens to someone when you remove their economic utility is that the whole deal of modern life was that you get a chance if you work hard and even that deal was already thin and AI raises the ceiling of what one person can produce and it raises the barrier to entry at the same time because you need to pay for access or have the hardware or hope that the model weights stay open and the knowledge workers say with AI not by AI as if that distinction matters to someone signing a cheque because they will always choose the token cost over the salary cost. I watched a mathematician I respect say that if your goal is to achieve something lasting in his field that will not be possible for much longer and I think about how the people who never learned to code feel like the obstacle has finally been removed because they do not have to deal with programmers anymore and the AI will not argue back and will tell them their ideas are brilliant and I think about how all the training data came from everything everyone ever wrote or made with no choice in the matter unless you knew to put up a sign and how the world leaders were told that falling behind is extinction and once that argument is made there is no stopping the funding. The money goes in and the data goes in and the leverage goes and the quiet pleasure of making something with your own attention goes and you end up in a system you opted into by existing and it is hard to see a way out and it is not a good place to be regardless of who you are.

If any of this connected come find me on Twitter. I am @troysk704.