Why the tech world thinks the American dream is dying

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Silicon Valley is filled with all sorts of dreams. But one of those wild-eyed ideas, long debated on subreddits and in hacker houses, is becoming a real-life nightmare: Will the AI boom be the last chance to get rich before artificial intelligence makes money essentially worthless? The argument is that tech companies (and their leaders) will become a class unto their own with infinite wealth.

No one else will have the means to generate money for themselves because AI will have taken their jobs and opportunities. In other words, the bridge is about to be raised for those chasing the American dream. And everyone is worried about being left on the wrong side.

It’s the kind of FOMO that on first blush seems to require a huge suspension of disbelief. But the idea’s mere existence helps explain some of the increasing class worries in California, where a growing movement to tax billionaires is roiling the Democratic Party, affordable housing is a real concern and the idea of the middle class seems out of reach. Yes, it smacks of sci-fi thinking.

But in San Francisco it feels real. And it’s made more believable by the exploits of Elon Musk, the rise of OpenAI’s Sam Altman and warnings by Anthropic’s Dario Amodei about Great Depression-like worker displacement. “The transition will be bumpy," Musk said this month on a podcast.

“We’ll have radical change, social unrest and immense prosperity." And that’s Musk’s best-case scenario. History is filled with technology booms that create new winners and losers. AI optimists like to point out that a rising tide has tended to lift all boats.