Somewhere between "AI takes all the jobs" and "AI makes everyone rich" sits a question nobody wants to do the math on: if machines get dramatically more productive over the next fifteen years, does that surplus end up funding a decent life for everyone? It's the Star Trek premise — nobody works for money because there's enough of everything. I went looking for the numbers behind that idea, and found something more interesting than either the doom or the utopia. The productivity gains are real. The gap between those gains and a living wage for everyone is enormous. And the…
I just watched David Heinemeier Hansson talk to Lex Fridman for five hours. Five. Hours. And the whole time I kept thinking: this guy is just like me. Then I did the math. Where I'm a third-level wizard, DHH is an eleventh-level wizard. Where he can hold sixteen threads in his head and run sixteen agents at once, I top out at three before I start dropping things. Where he has an unlimited bucket of tokens to throw at a problem, I'm watching the meter — every bit of agentic magic I cast costs me actual dollars, and I feel…