Joshua Clemans

There are a few things that Manidis and Roberts get exactly right. Small firms will achieve outcomes completely disproportionate to their headcount. These “raiding party” sized groups will outperform at a shocking scale. The countries that rose through the outsourcing of backoffices will fall as those jobs evaporate into the algo. Call center countries reduced to scam hovels. Scarce, permanent assets will be the holy grail of the AI economy. Assets that cannot be vibe-coded, that will grow under AI dominance rather than shrink. These will often be "rails", physical sites, or “nation-state” assets like a power grid, a copper mine, or a strategic landmass. “The fourth settlement is one sympathetic to great men and leaves little room for labor as you know it.” This is one of the best lines in the piece and a nice key to the next few decades. If you told people two hundred years ago that labor would be abolished, they would be stoked. Today they whine, “don’t take my toil, let me listen to a pod while I type.” Inevitably, some of the predictions in the piece will miss. Where this is the case, I think it will be a result of the authors' sheer proximity to the center. Too near to the fire, lobotomized by the Flow. NYC and SF crowds are certain that their world is the only one. A perennial solipsism dominates both bubbles, a gravitational pull that Manidis and Roberts (and the friendly ghost of Leopold Aschenbrenner) are not immune to. The authors argue that all capital will be made subservient to the Line. The Line must go up. AI must continue its march, even irrationally, to prevent massive capital destruction of all that has come before. But outside of the epicenters, the people have no allegiance to the Line. My brother in Idaho has no allegiance to the Line. Your friend who bartends in Orlando has no allegiance to the Line. For the Leopolds in SF and the FO boys on wall street, it may be their only reality, their existence and work and net worth but the everyman has not corrupted his mind with expectations of winning the final gluttonous end times tech lottery. He has no allegiance to the Line. Manidis and Roberts argue that the populace will be tied via pensions, equities, and trump accounts to the success of AI, but I don’t see that that coupling has truly taken place yet. Downstream of this, I still don't see the US nationalizing the AI labs. The labs tried hard but the critical moment has come and gone. The administration has already decided that it is intolerable to be equity partners with Altman or Dario. Some will live and some will die. As long as boomers have a blood in their veins, they'll cling to their free-markets while the groypers and DSA kids would rather see recession than the tech oligarchs and bankers enriched in victory. Where does this take us? Coming years will be dominated by powerful firms in the private sector and great men, value will accrue to assets that are scarce and durable, companies will act more like countries. Will and Joe are going to make some killer, generational investments during this era. Thanks to Will and Joe for writing and giving people something think about and to shoot at. I saw some folks complain that the piece is too grim or apocalyptic. I blame the popularization of end times biblical language by the one paypal co-founder. The future that the bible actually predicts is much more interesting. One of the inevitable victory of christendom–––the past and future conquest of Christ over all. Shaping the victorious timeline is our ultimate duty and opportunity.