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What’s interesting is the really hard problem AI has not been applied to is how to manage these technologies in our socio-economic-cultural system. The world is agog at the apparent power of ChatGPT and similar programs to compose human-level narratives and generate images from simple commands.

The net result of hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization is the crumbling of the middle class. Neofeudal societies and economies lack a vibrant middle class. This is the defining feature of feudalism and its updated V2.0, neofeudalism: a nobility (based on birth or finance, it doesn’t matter) controls the vast majority of wealth, political power and productive capital, all served by a powerless peasantry.

We will enter a world without finance, and it will be a better world, for the economy will no longer be in thrall to the derangement and inequality of parasitic, predatory finance. A world without finance is currently unimaginable, because finance is now synonymous with financialization.

There is an element of inevitability in play, but it isn’t about central bank bailouts, it’s about Death Spirals and the collapse of unsustainable systems.

Simply put, people are moving not just to escape unaffordable housing and high taxes. They’re moving to escape fiscally irresponsible, ineffective, unaccountable governance. Defenders of high state taxes like to point out that surveys find few high-net-worth households move primarily to lower their tax bills.