A Bonanza For Capital

It's a rough situation for workers, but not for those who have money already.

The kind of person who will be just fine with the arrival of AI.

Now that we know who the losers may be moving forward (pretty much anyone who works for a living), who are the winners? In short, people with enough resources to take risks.This is the problem most workers, if they aren't in highly-paid positions, face: they don't have the money to take risks. Without excess capital to plow into ventures that could eventually turn into income-producing assets, it's pretty difficult to move up the economic ladder.

A worker could get extremely lucky and stumble on/create something that becomes valuable, which is unlikely. Or they could commit to a life of crime and just steal someone else's assets, which requires you to get a job on Wall Street.

Barring those possibilities, workers don't have the means to utilize the primary way to make a lot of money in a capitalist economy, which is investing excess cash. They're stuck in the death spiral of lower wages, fewer opportunities and a worsening of their overall quality of life.

The Best Time Ever for Business?

But what's bad for workers tends to be good for those with capital to spare. If you look at everything that's been discussed until now through the eyes of capital, you see endless opportunity.

If you don't need to hire as many (or any) people, that means you can test out new markets, new products and new services quickly and efficiently. When workers don't have the leverage to ensure they get paid enough, it's easy to find high-quality, low cost labor for those situations where you have no choice but to hire someone.

Overall, this means if you have the resources to start and scale your own enterprise, you're living through perhaps the best time ever to do so. As long as you have money, you don't need credentials, nor do you need to concern yourself with how an employer treats you—you can do as you wish, as long as you continue to make money.

With all the cheap, scalable tools at your disposal, you don't even necessarily need a ton of money. All you need is enough to afford a quantity of experiments that you can hit statistical significance with, then either scale what works or kill what doesn't. When you hit something solid, just hire some cheap labor, automate it as much as you can, and move on to the next market or product line.

The problem is that this is risky if you aren't already wealthy. A person with only enough money to run an experiment or two is not in a position to succeed, since failure will wipe them out. Wealthy people, on the other hand, can afford to fail over and over again in the pursuit of a winning business.

Cost of experimentation is a big chunk of what separates the winners and losers in any capitalist economy. With AI, this cost will continue to go down—but not to zero. You will still need some kind of seed capital to get going, and if you're stuck at the bottom of the economic hierarchy without high-paying options, you're going to have a bad time.