How to Escape the Permanent Underclass

As the value of labour tends toward zero, the value of assets will tend toward infinity. This is the Singularity.

AGI (2029). Artificial General Intelligence will reach human-level capability across all domains (language, reasoning, spatial understanding, and physical manipulation). The cost of intelligence and productive labour collapses. Intelligence and compute are now directly correlated.

ASI (~2040–2045). Self-improving artificial superintelligence emerges, representing a collective cognition greater than all humanity. At this stage, the velocity of progress exceeds human comprehension.

Post-Bretton-Woods economics has no theoretical growth limit. As productive capacity becomes infinite and labour costs vanish, asset prices must diverge from wages. Wages approach zero ─ assets approach infinity (Marx was wrong in that regard).

Value is still being created by AI, not by humans so the share of that value accrues to asset holders. The median individual, dependent on wages, is permanently decoupled from growth. Thus begins the Permanent Underclass. The wage-asset divergence accelerates, increasing the difficulty of the Asset-poor from escaping their poverty. This is not where you want to be.

When AGI arrives, every company and asset capable of compounding intelligence will undergo exponential repricing. The “AI bubble” will look like a speed bump. The rational response is to maximise exposure to those assets (technologies, infrastructure, or startups) that are building the post-AGI climate.

Leverage the present to buy the future. A mid-paying job will just result in your wages being increasingly spent on useless shit like food and water. If anything, working for someone else is now riskier than taking agency in any regard. The only rational hedge is ownership in assets.

Complacency will fail. One’s own agency will compound.

We have four years.

Grow with the Singularity, not against it.
See you on the other side.