In another great newsletter, my friend Curt Buermeyer summarizes Peter Diamandis’s three-phase roadmap from AI labor disruption to post-scarcity abundance. I’ll be honest — I want to believe it. Curt and I agree that the next five years are going to be rough. But where he sees a ten-year arc bending toward something beautiful, I see a timeline that assumes robotic construction, autonomous transport, AI healthcare, and vertical farming all scale and democratize faster than any infrastructure transformation in human history. But here’s the thing about being a pessimist: often you’re wrong, and that is a beautiful thing. Curt’s optimism is grounded and honest, not naive, and Diamandis has a track record of being right about exponential curves before the rest of us could see them. So I’m bookmarking this roadmap not because I’m convinced, but because I hope like hell they’re right and I’m wrong.

Article Excerpt:

I believe we’re facing a reality where roughly 40% to 50% of white-collar jobs—the knowledge work that college students and recent grads have spent years studying for—will likely be displaced almost overnight.

Article Summary:

Curt Buermeyer’s latest Smash Your Thinking newsletter summarizes a roadmap by Peter Diamandis (XPRIZE founder, exponential tech evangelist) for navigating the AI-driven collapse of the labor market without also collapsing the social contract. The core argument: the AI disruption won’t look like the Industrial Revolution, which reshuffled the workforce over 150 years. This one is compressed into a decade, and there’s no adjacent sector to retrain into because AI is eating every sector simultaneously.

Diamandis lays out three phases. Phase 1 (2025–2028): the fracture. Jobs disappear, identities crater, and the proposed floor is a $3,000/month Universal Basic Income paired with a 32-hour workweek to keep people attached to purpose and social structure while the shock absorbs. Phase 2 (2028–2031): the automation dividend. AI companies have extracted enormous value from public infrastructure — our data, our research, our systems — and the public deserves a share. Think Alaska Permanent Fund, but for the robot economy. Phase 3 (2031–2035): the great deflation. Housing drops from $2,000/month to $600. Transport falls to $225. Food, energy, and healthcare trend toward near-zero marginal cost, driven by robotics, solar, autonomous fleets, and AI diagnostics.

Curt adds his own caveat: he’s skeptical the Phase 3 deflation happens as fast as Diamandis projects. Prices in housing, healthcare, and food have never actually gone down for normal people, and he’d bet the timeline slips. The actionable close is straightforward: share the roadmap, audit what you’d do with your time if survival wasn’t the point, and pressure policymakers to build the bridging mechanisms now — before “the Valley” between 2026 and 2031 turns into something uglier.

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The post Will AI Force US to Adopt Universal Basic Income? first appeared on Sevenelles.

There was a version of the ultra-wealthy that at least felt some obligation — real or performative — to the world that made them rich. That version is being quietly escorted out. What’s replacing it is a cohort of ideological mercenaries who’ve convinced themselves that hoarding capital and influencing elections is philanthropy, and that Warren Buffett passing around a philanthropy pledge card was somehow the real corruption. What happens when “giving back “is no longer fashionable? I’m guessing “not good things” , and we will all soon find out.

Article Excerpt:

Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and a frequent Gates critic, said in an interview that he had privately encouraged around a dozen Giving Pledge signers to undo it. ‘Most of the ones I’ve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,’ he said.

Article Summary:

In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates launched the Giving Pledge — a moral commitment for billionaires to donate more than half their wealth to charity. It was, briefly, the fashionable thing to do. Oval Office visits happened. Fortune covers happened. Over 250 families signed on, including MacKenzie Scott, Mike Bloomberg, and Sam Altman.

The vibe was: big capitalism and big philanthropy can coexist, and being seen as a ‘good billionaire’ actually mattered. Fast forward to now, and the whole thing is being treated like an embarrassing yearbook photo.

Signups have cratered — 113 in the first five years, down to just 4 in 2024. The Trump administration views the Pledge as roughly a punchline. Peter Thiel has been actively lobbying signers to bail, calling it an ‘Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club’ (again — the man has his own Epstein ties, so that’s a bold rhetorical swing).

One signer actually unsigned it, which the article notes is ‘without precedent,’ which tells you something about the current climate. The new dominant ideology among ascendant tech billionaires holds that philanthropy is basically a PR scam, and that the real gift to humanity is just making more money and letting it trickle somewhere.

Elon Musk has said his “businesses are philanthropy.” That sentence exists. Meanwhile, the Gates Foundation’s causes — global health, gender equality — are being actively dismantled by the administration that many of these same billionaires helped elect. Also worth noting: the Pledge has no enforcement mechanism whatsoever. It’s a moral commitment.

Which, given the moral inventory of some of its critics, may be precisely the problem.

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The post Fuck Philanthropy. Our Billionaires Want More Toys! first appeared on Sevenelles.