The only Permanent Underclass are the ones who believe it is permanent

For a while now there has been a persistent "gallows humor" meme about missing out on the generational wealth that will result in AI:

As someone who has written about the Light And Dark Side of the API Economy, this is a topic that has obvious parallels to the reinvented class systems created by tech. I think there’s some very real datapoints for believing this:

• Meta FAIR researchers making $500k/year vs those making >$25m/yr at Meta SuperIntelligence Labs
• Big tends to get bigger in capitalism, and especially AI
  
• Giant runups in valuations in the big labs with OpenAI giving a $1.5m bonus to every employee and offering $6b in secondary sales for employees, while Anthropic went from $4b in valuation to $183b in 2 years, with most employees expected to work in office in San Francisco, should cause an insane run up in real estate prices in SF, vastly increasing the wealth gap between owners of land and the renters who will never be able to become owners - the permanent underclass.
• I think there’s another emerging, but smaller, underclass between coders who can effectively wield coding agents to their full extent, and those who are skeptical + have skill issues such that they never get the personal aha moments to overcome their skepticism, because the productivity of most Good Agentic Coders will (eventually! maybe not this year!) far overwhelm that of most Trad Coders. Jobs will bifurcate between the fabulously rich and fun Tiny Teams who live Above the Agentic Coding line and the humdrum, hates-life, Jira ticket logging big enterprise jobs who live below it.

So yeah, I’m not denying the underclass will exist and gaps will widen. Pretty much the entire history of technology and capitalism has taught us this and there is no reason to expect it to reverse. I’m sorry if I’m bursting your bubble here.

My problem is with people fatalistically joking, and many secretly unironically believing, that it will be permanent.

No, this is very low agency thinking.

You are not too old to escape the underclass. Inequality aside, AI also increases class mobility, not rigidity. The Great Sorting is improving over time, not reducing. Except - the Great Sorting will now happen. most on your level of agency, not on your IQ.

All of these are objectively true and getting more true every day:

1. People can now learn English faster than ever before.
2. People can now learn to code faster than ever before.
3. People can now learn ML/AI Engineering faster than ever before.
4. It is easier to work remotely/run a completely online business than ever before.
5. Stripe Atlas/YC have made it easier to start a startup than ever before.
6. New AI models and business models are enabling new startups to ramp from 0-100m-1b in revenue in faster and faster cycles, and ALSO for mature businesses to reinvent themselves with AI (not the bullshit ”my boss really wants you to think we are an AI company” kind of marketing, but actually meaningfully do so).
7. It is easier to train/finetune LLMs than ever before.
8. (Near?) frontier RL is eminently learnable and hackable.

In general most people like to say AI will lower the floor and raise the ceiling for human accomplishment (as in, “lower the floor” = lower the entry level skill needed to do something interesting, “raise the ceiling” = raise the productivity/output/quality of high skill people already in the industry), and it will be locally true, but in general the more accurate dividing line is people who learn and use AI with high agency will probably get themselves out of The Underclass more than people who do not.