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Prior tech booms, even the NFT Moment, did seem to have more of a collective sense that an opportunistic normal person could cash in on them (and some did). Now, it *feels* like only the employees of a very small number of companies and their investors are actually *profiting* from the AI boom.

The argument seems to be more that “these tools will help normal people build stuff that they can make money off of,” but where’s the evidence that this is happening? People ARE using LLMs to code Stuff, often quite cool stuff - but is this making them money? Idk?

Feels like tech has long had the baked in assumption that people making stuff will = Money for at least some of them (with good timing and luck) - and it at least FEELS (again) like this is breaking down rapidly.

It also FEELS like companies do not have the foggiest idea how to hire or fund people who have become genuinely good at using The Robot

In the long wake of the Great Recession, the classic tiresome, pat answer to people who couldn’t find a decent job was “learn to code.” Now, do we have a similarily oversimplified yet sorta-plausible answer for people who no longer can find stable employment? I don’t think we do. That’s unsettling.

I see some people trying to claim the new answer to “I can’t find a job” is “healthcare,” but you can tell their heart isn’t really in it.

And I mean, yeah, if you know healthcare workers, you probably also know that working in healthcare (if you don’t have a genuine interest in it) really does not seem like a particularly attractive proposition right now

Like some of us do in fact remember what healthcare workers went through during peak COVID

And scamming the elderly out of ever larger amounts of money appears to be a helluva growth industry these days - which genAI makes that much easier.

I wonder if all the advertising I have been seeing recently for various AI enterprises is as much to normalize the idea of AI as worth supporting (or at least not opposing) as it is to actually get any normal person to make a purchase. It's not like most people will buy AI the way we would a car or

“The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report shows cyber-enabled crimes defrauded Americans of nearly $21 billion, with cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence-related complaints among the costliest.”

The top video game release in America is a game about boosting cars. People are realizing that there is no legal way to make millions anymore, at least for the vast majority of folx.