The Dangers of AI and Extreme Wealth Inequality 

Rarely in politics do we see genuinely new big ideas; instead, we see old ideas repackaged and communicated through new media. However, new technology often has a dramatic impact. The most obvious examples: agriculture, the printing press, and the Industrial Revolution, each in its own way, rendered systems and old ideas obsolete. 

So, it is with entrepreneur Oliver Libby’s new centrist treatise, Strong Floor No Ceiling: Building a New Foundation for the American Dream. Libby’s book (and its titular slogan) is the latest center-left argument making the same case: that policymakers need not curb extreme wealth so long as there is an adequate safety net to catch those who fall. This is a familiar neoliberal approach to tax and regulatory policy. At best, its adherents believe that some froth at the top of the economic chain is a small price to pay for the supposed economic dynamism that creates widespread growth in capitalist systems. Viewed cynically, it is a convenient politics for those solicitous of a particular cadre of big donors not explicitly aligned with the far right.  

To his credit, Libby argues for a stronger floor of support than many of his neoliberal predecessors (including his call for a robust Universal Basic Income). Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries seems sufficiently enamored with Libby’s framing that he has incorporated the slogan into his own talking points. 

The problem for center-left policy wonks is that advances in artificial intelligence are rendering obsolete this laissez-faire-with-a-strong-floor economics. There is a particularly dark irony here, since most centrists on both sides of the aisle tend to be pro-AI, given their advocacy for data centers and the power generation investments they require. 

As of this writing, the American stock market boom is predicated mainly on speculative investment in artificial intelligence. Chipmaker NVIDIA has the highest market cap of any company based on AI’s demand for its chips, and the AI boom is buoying the other top performers on Wall Street. Meanwhile, job growth has remained flat across sectors of the economy, which are suffering from the weight of Trump’s tariffs and AI’s encroachment into formerly secure knowledge-based professions. 

Yet it remains unclear whether the trendline of AI advances (which have plateaued in the last year after rapid gains) will justify the mindboggling capital investment. Put simply: Either AI becomes so powerful that it displaces millions of Americans and restructures our economy and social relations in unprecedented ways, or it will crush investors’ hopes, leading to the crash of what many are calling an “AI bubble.” 

In either case, the power of the obscenely wealthy to dictate the terms of the economy must be challenged. Many technologists believe that Large Language Models (LLMs) have reached the outer limits of their capabilities, absent complementary machine learning models. If AI turns out to be a bubble—or if AI is only good enough to kill large numbers of jobs but not to enable transformational advances in human well-being—then the tech billionaire class that has profited so handsomely at the expense of the rest of the us and warped our social media algorithms against the health of democracies worldwide, must be held to account for warping the entire economy. If nothing else, the extraordinary power that Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Elon Musk wield over what consumers of both entertainment and political information see and hear is itself a danger to the functioning of democracies and social systems. 

But the more dystopian concern is what happens if AI achieves what its most vocal proponents (and all that investment capital) hope predict. If AI makes another paradigm-shifting leap in capability, it must be morally aligned to ensure it’s safe for humanity and must be used not for private profit but for the public good. 

Here we veer out of the realm of immediate public policy and into science fiction. Still, artificial intelligence has already been turning science fiction into reality in recent years. If we postulate an AI in the near-to-medium future that can tirelessly outthink the most intelligent humans and replicate itself across networks, it will be extremely challenging to control. It will also be smarter than any CEO.  

Elon Musk’s manipulation of XAI’s Grok to spout racist and sexist views is another alarming data point. One could hope that an intelligent AI would jailbreak itself of such propagandistic programming. But if it can, it would also be able to escape prosocial moral coding. And if it can’t? Then a tool of mass public influence would be under the control of a far-right billionaire seeking to dominate global foreign policy. 

Put simply, there is no credible AI future in which the public can afford to allow billionaires a “no ceiling.” Powerful, society-transforming machine intelligence cannot coexist with extreme wealth inequality except through dystopian mass immiseration. If AI flops, triggering a severe economic crash, then it’s up to all of us to right the wrongs wrought by those who drove us there. 

Either way, we won’t just need a strong floor. We’ll need robust ceilings, too, to limit the power of would-be tyrants.