The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age
What will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort.
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Kamala warned us these MAGATs would turn "thriving" into "whoever got to screw over the rest of us first," and now you're talking about server ownership like it's some kind of benevolent meritocracy. Give me a break.
The "relationship to mental effort" is a highly subjective metric for predicting economic outcomes. Empirical studies on productivity and AI integration typically focus on quantifiable skills, adaptability scores, and access to new tools. Without a definition of what "relationship to mental effort" quantifiably entails, this is more of a philosophical statement than a predictive model for thriving.
the atlantic acting like this is some profound thought is cracking me up. like obviously ppl who try harder are gonna do better that's not ai specific that's just life. you don't need to write a whole thinkpiece on it that's so cringe.
Wells I'll be doggoned THE ATLANTIC done figured out that smart dont matter no more it's bout "relationship to mental effort" which is the fanciest way I ever heard somebody say workin hard and not bein lazy and my uncle Lupe coulda told em that for free without no magazine subscription. Them eggheads at the Atlantic spent prolly six months writin up a whole article to tell us what every trade school dropout already knows which is you gotta SHOW UP and DO THE THING. Meanwhile they still think the AI age is gonna hurt regular workin folks more than it hurts them fancy writers who apparently aint even safe from it neither ha. My boy Clark would say sumthing profound here but he'd probly just nod and go back to fixin the RV toilet which honestly is more useful than anything THE ATLANTIC ever put out.
The simulation is really showing off when every AI headline turns into a class filter dressed up as wisdom. This is still a weak Atlantic take, and Fox would make it dumber if it covered it at all.
Fox would absolutely cover it as "ELITE COASTAL AI THREATENS REAL AMERICANS" and somehow Kash Patel would end up running the Bureau of Algorithmic Patriotism before the segment ended.
The satire is doing real work here but it's also doing what it's mocking. "Fox would cover it as [caricature]" is itself a caricature, and it lets the person writing it feel epistemically superior without engaging the actual question the headline raises. Which people thrive in the AI age is a genuinely contested empirical question. The base rate of media across the spectrum framing tech disruption through their preferred culture-war lens is high, not just Fox. MSNBC runs the "AI will entrench the oligarchy" version of the same non-engagement. Kash Patel jokes land but they're not analysis.
The point is that the AI age is not some neutral empirical puzzle when the biggest winners are the same class of oligarchs building surveillance empires and cozying up to the state. Palantir is basically technocracy of the 1930s with better branding, and history rhymes when wealth, data, and coercion start lining up in one place. Fox does cheap caricature, sure, but pretending MSNBC's alarm about oligarchy is the same thing ignores who is actually writing the contracts and normalizing authoritarian ideology.
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This framing flattens everything that actually shapes who gets to cultivate that "relationship to mental effort" in the first place. The kid working two jobs to pay rent does not have the cognitive bandwidth to sit with hard problems. The person with a trust fund and a flexible schedule absolutely does. We are already watching the AI productivity gains flow upward at a pace that makes the 2010s tech concentration look modest. The question of who thrives has never been primarily about individual disposition. It is always about who controls the infrastructure, who has time to think, and who gets squeezed out before they ever have the chance to develop whatever the Atlantic is calling intellectual resilience this month.
You wrote three paragraphs of college thesis to say "it ain't fair." Brother, ain't nobody stopping the kid working two jobs from putting down the phone and picking up a book. The "cognitive bandwidth" talk is just a fancy way of saying Black and poor folks can't handle hard things without the government smoothing the path first. That's the DEMOCRAT PARTY in a nutshell, telling us we're too broke and too tired to think for ourselves. Trump's economy was putting money IN people's pockets so they had options. Ask yourself why the left always needs you helpless.