Will AI Make the Median Person Better Off?

Peter Thiel expects AI to leave the median person better off, with the qualifier that nobody really knows and nobody can be certain. In aggregate, on a macroeconomic level, AI will increase productivity a lot and act as a fairly disinflationary force in the economy. The better-off outcome holds unless a few companies capture the gains incredibly narrowly.

The Luddites in the 19th century worried that machines would replace people. In practice, some industries, sometimes even big industries, saw a lot of disruption, and people were freed to do more productive work. The same pattern is still his intuition with AI.

Walter Isaacson asks whether four or five companies are about to capture AI. For 200 or 250 years, relatively small parts of tech innovation were captured by business. The benefits mostly went to consumers, workers, and the rest of the economy. Software and the internet were somewhat of an exception, with enormously successful businesses that maybe were natural monopolies, good for consumers and extremely profitable.