Tech World Says Get Rich Now, or Fuhgedaboudit!

The panjandrums of Silicon Valley see a future, largely of their creation, that prompts this warning: If you want to get rich, you'd better be about it, because it won't be possible once AI takes over.

Having spent trillions building a fortress of data centers, they will own the technology that runs the world. They few foresee that their infinite wealth will make them a superclass well removed from the rest of us. We will get the crumbs. AI will destroy work and eliminate opportunities for us to generate money, much less get rich. Well get to what that leads to, but first a look at the here and now.

The effect on jobs is already making itself known. New college graduates are having difficulty finding employment with companies deciding that AI can handle entry-level work.

In January 130,000 net jobs were created. Significantly, health care, not say manufacturing, accounted for more than half. The number that drew greatest attention is that, after backward revisions afrom laggard data that trickled in, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says only 181,000 net jobs (new hiring offset by jobs lost) were created over the entirety of 2025, about 400,000 fewer than the 584,000 that were initially reported for last year and far below the 1.4 million net gains of 2024.

Today, we are seeing layoffs announced almost daily. Amazon plans to do away with 30,000 corporate office employees. UPS is shedding 30,000. Microsoft has cut about 15,000 jobs, while investing heavily in AI data centers. Salesforce slimmed its customer support workforce by 4,000; CEO Marc Benioff says AI now handles up to half of the company’s work.

Layoffs announced in January alone totaled over 108,000 jobs, the largest amount for January since 2009 in the wake of the Great Recession. And for the remainder of 2026, more than 100 companies, from Nike to Verizon, have filed legally required WARN notices about their intent to reduce headcount this year.

Factors additional to AI contribute to these job cuts, but the promised efficiencies of AI no doubt encourage these companies to think they can do more with less. Aggravating the current job market, says a January Harvard Business Review article, is that companies are laying off workers now not because AI is performing so well in their stead, but because of a belief that in time it will.

It is difficult to predict just how significant job erosion will be, with the result that estimates vary to extremes. The International Monetary Fund estimates, without venturing a time span, that globally 300 million full-time jobs could be affected by AI. Separately, they estimate that over 40% of workers will require significant “upskilling” by 2030.

The World Economic Forum estimates 92 million jobs will be displaced by AI by 2030. Black and Hispanic workers will be hardest hit because they are overrepresented in roles more likely to be replaced by automation and AI.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, an AI developer, warns that AI could eliminate 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years, potentially pushing U.S. unemployment rates from 10% to 20%.

Microsoft has put out a study listing the 40 job categories that will be most “impacted” by AI. Leading the list in number of persons affected are almost three million customer service workers and 1.1 million sales representatives. Accompanying the list, Microsoft wrote,

”Our research shows that AI supports many tasks,…but does not indicate it can fully perform any single occupation.”

That’s undercut by Microsoft itself laying off 30,000 in its corporate offices due to the “application” of AI.

Just a few years ago, the word was that everyone should learn software coding. It was a job opportunity bonanza. Hundreds of thousands were hired, no matter how inexperienced. Today, AI savants are hired, some for astronomical paychecks, but the bottom has dropped out for software journeymen working in traditional languages. Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google) predicts that within one year, most programming work will be done by AI.

Suddenly it has become one of the most vulnerable job categories, thanks to code creation AI such as Anthropic’s Claude Code. Unlike OpenAI, which went after the general query market with its chatGPT series, Claude specializes in coding. In an article for The New Yorker by a skeptical programmer, who "even celebrated its shortcomings", writes that he had to learn AI for his job only to find that his "conversion was swift":

"Eventually, I gave [AI models] real work — the kind I'd trained my whole career to do. I saw these models digest, in seconds, the intricate details of thousands of lines of code. They could spot subtle bugs and orchestrate complex new features."

code red

The consensus has it that AI may reshape employment far more profoundly than previous technology upheavals. The administration wants AI development to proceed at full throttle. The industry lobbies against any regulation. Said Senator Bernie Sanders in an interview Tuesday:

“We have not a clue. We are totally unprepared for what is coming.”

Anthropic’s Amodei is more outspoken than others. Two weeks ago he published a 38-page essay that warns civilization faces “real danger” from superhuman AI arriving as soon as 2027, describing it as potentially “the single most serious national security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.” There are many apocalyptic predictions of superhuman AI going rogue and doing away with humans, but Amodei is on a different tack. He foresees a grotesque imbalance in which the AI hegemons, the U.S. and China, will develop ever more powerful systems that will so concentrate wealth that we may see personal fortunes reaching trillions of dollars. He thinks his peers have an obligation to confront this problem, but instead…

”It is sad to me that many wealthy individuals (especially in the tech industry) have recently adopted a cynical and nihilistic attitude that philanthropy is inevitably fraudulent or useless.”

Amodei envisages a future in which 10 million people — 7 million in Silicon Valley and the rest scattered elsewhere — could “decouple” from the rest of society,

The vast majority, even in the tech superpower nations, will be left far behind. That has the savants in the Valley musing about what to do about them. One idea is that the enormously expanded economy they are certain AI will yield could pay a dividend to the populace to help them along. Even better: “There will be no poverty in the future and so no need to save money,” says Elon Musk. “There will be universal high income.”

That would presumably take the form of a universal basic income (UBI) as a safety net for everyone laid waste by permanent and massive job loss. It’s a topic reportedly batted around amongst the oligarchs who contemplate ways to placate the serfs.

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, which produced chatGPT and its successors, voiced some concerns about that in a podcast last year:

“I used to be really excited about UBI…but I think people really need agency; they need to feel like they have a voice in governing the future and deciding where things go. If you just say, ‘OK, AI is going to do everything and then everybody gets…a dividend from that,’ it’s not going to feel good, and I don’t think it actually would be good for people.”

Admirable of Altman to put a moment of reflection on the record. Well to remember, though, that he founded OpenAI as an altruistic non-profit, but further reflection told him he’d better find a way for it to spin off a for-profit subsidiary for him to partake of. He is already worth $1.8 billion according to Forbes.

A universal basic income would be sold by the tech world as a paradise of leisurely living to win over the public on an AI future. But then what? Where would the money come from? The government, with the national debt already verging on $39 trillion? The AI industry? Imagine the tech trillionaires battling Congress, and if they lose that the government collect just enough money per family unit to head off civil uprisings. They’d insist from their yachts cruising the Mediterranean that a bowl of gruel served up with a daily ration of soma to keep us pacified should suffice to achieve at long last Mr. Huxley’s “Brave New World”.

Out of concern for the distorted society that AI’s headlong enhancement portends, are the tech moguls having second thoughts and slowing down? Certainly not. They are going flat out, resisting any rumblings of laws or regulations to hold them in check.

Microsoft spent more than $80 billion last year on AI infrastructure and data centers with $30 billion planned for this quarter. The firm is closely tied to OpenAI, having invested $13 billion in that company.

Alphabet (Google) intends to spend $125 to $135 billion in capital expenditures this year after $92 billion last year.

Amazon, which on Thursday said it expects to spend $200 billion this year, is now looking at negative free cash flow of almost $17 billion in 2026, so it will have to borrow heavily.

OpenAI is looking for $100 billion in additional funding as it works down the last $40 billion from its previous funding round. The company hopes to raise it from its previous investors — Microsoft, Nvidia, Softbank, and the United Arab Emirates. It plans to spend $115 billion over the next four years on software and data centers and has committed to spending $1.4 trillion over the long term. OpenAI brought in $13 billion in revenue last year, loses money, yet is valued at $500 billion, making it one of the world's most valuable companies.

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) will spend up to $135 billion this year on researchers charged with developing "superintelligent" AI and on building the data centers where the code will plumb ever-larger language models in his quest to leave the human species in the dust. That's almost double the past year's $72 billion. Zuckerberg says the data centers will be powered by "tens of gigawatts this decade and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time", no mention of who pays to build-out electricity production.

Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are expected to spend nearly $700 billion combined this year to fuel their AI build-outs, a 60% increase above last year.

Here’s Sanders again:

”A handful of billionaires. It’s Musk, and Bezos and Zuckerberg and Altman and Ellison…the richest people in the world are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI and robotics. You think they’re worried about the implications of that for working people, the middle class? I don’t think so.”

Whatever the outcome, they will own it all, and from the largest corporations to small businesses, all will be paying them for use of their AI to minimize the number of people on their payrolls.

In September, persons from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, the U.K. AI Security Institute, and the OECD concluded,

"AI is likely to exacerbate increasing wealth and income inequality within countries, worsening economic conditions for many working and middle-class people and families."