[ExI] Why is “cost of living” such a big problem?

[Adrian Tymes]

This has been a problem for decades, since long before modern AI.
Slowly boiling anger over it is part of what led to Trump's initial
election, and re-election.

Worker productivity has been rising for a while, before modern AI.
But most of the profits of that keep getting captured by a tiny elite,
and workers keep getting squeezed more and more.  Much of what
productivity improvements there have been from AI, at least at large
companies, are getting the same treatment.

Small businesses...well, most people are not their own bosses.  Not
everyone's cut out for that responsibility.  There's a large
percentage of workers who'll only ever work for someone else, never
for themselves.

Even the Singularity might not overturn this by itself.  Those who
live by sucking up other peoples' productivity have gotten quite good
at it - and they now have AI assistance in their endeavor, with more
access (on average) than the average worker.

On Sun, Nov 1, 2026 at 11:59 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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> Why do wages seem to be falling behind inflation? I know tariffs and the war in Iran play a role, but it seems to me that there’s more to it. I also suspect health care is only beginning to become a major part of the problem, as the number of expensive treatments and cures continues to grow exponentially.
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> But why isn’t AI boosting productivity enough to help everyone afford more, despite these pressures?  It seems like people aren’t doing better than their parents were?  Why is that?
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> How much longer will it take? How much further into the singularity do we need to go before the cost of living begins to noticeably decline for everyone?
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