So, the course of AI is currently in the hands of ~10 billionaires. That seems like the root cause here to me. And I don't think AI made them terrible, other people agreeing with single every brain fart they uttered rotted any reasonable sense of self worth into narcissism and psychosis. But each and every one of them knows how to play power games: they build coalitions around themselves that make them nearly impossible to depose. Compare and contrast with Carly Fiorina who was not particularly good at this and never made it to three commas.

For the record, IMO AI and LLMs are amazing and magical technology. And they raise important existential questions about abilities we once considered hallmarks of conscience and sentience that can be reduced to floating point math. I think people find that threatening having invested quite a bit of ego in being the sole possessors of such abilities. I do not see them as a threat to art: go watch a live performance or visit an art museum. But boy can they create content. And most human content was slop to begin with, see photoslop.

But it's also a cop out to cite that to rationalize the billionaire situation as if everything is fine. It's absolutely 100% not. Musk's investments in Ken Paxton alone should be enough to drive a wealth tax on unrealized capital gains past $1B or so through Congress in 2027, but it likely won't because so many consider themselves temporarily embarrassed paper billionaires. Note that Meta and Zuckerberg have already blinked on this in California. Now if Musk could have just stuck to robots and spaceships, he wouldn't have made himself such a sore thumb, but nooooooo...

And a wealth tax won't solve the national debt. I know that. Duh. But it will start to erode the ridiculous level of influence the top 10 billionaires in tech have right now. The Dictator's Handbook argues that taxation is how leaders transfer money from people they don't like to people they like. Elect people who hate the billionaires and this will all happen organically. Wealth taxes on everyone are bad, that's a given. We're not talking everyone here. We're talking the top 2000 or so richest in America. And if their demographic has no problem going after "welfare queens" I do not see the problem in returning the favor.

Meanwhile, in autocratic China, the AI situation is somehow much healthier than in the states. Go figure.