@ZacariahHeim If not we risk swapping one form of concentrated power for another, all while the technology itself keeps accelerating. We already need to run to catch up.
@ZacariahHeim I think there’s too much survival thinking being pushed on the population, and too much vote thinking being desperately held on to by politicians, and not enough longtermism. Most political planning operates on 2- to 5-year election cycles and this is stalling progress.
@ZacariahHeim for those outside the "productive" loop (children, disabled people, caregivers, older generations). Can we build verifiable, rules-based systems that don't require perpetual goodwill from either corporations or governments?
@ZacariahHeim At the same time, any ethics of AI abundance has to confront the harder trade-offs: not every sector will generate easily measurable "AI rents," care work and local services may stay stubbornly as they are, and unconditional floors will still be needed
@ZacariahHeim It preserves dignity and agency by embedding claims closer to where value is actually generated, rather than asking people to trust distant institutions that have already, as you say, eroded public confidence.
@ZacariahHeim Bottom-up surplus-sharing does feel ethically superior because it treats the upside as co-created rather than something that must be clawed back later through fragile centralized mechanisms.
@ZacariahHeim I don’t trust politicians to do this right, so who can we trust? There are prominant figures, like Elon Musk, who have to walk their talk by setting an example. He did it with DOGE, now do it with this?
@ZacariahHeim That risks turning AI from a liberatory technology into a new feudalism: a handful of model owners and capital holders extract rents, while the rest of society depends on whatever redistribution the political moment allows.
@ZacariahHeim If intelligence does become radically cheaper and more scalable, the central moral failure would be allowing the gains to remain, as is typical now, in narrow ownership while everyone else is left negotiating with increasingly powerful systems they don't trust or control.
@ZacariahHeim The ethical stakes in your article's framing of AI need to be discussed with the intent to make change, by the people who are able to actually make change happen. I'm all for distributive justice in a (hopefully we get there) post-scarcity world.
@ZacariahHeim One of my concerns is potential widening of inequality, because that gap is already too wide. This quote particularly got my attention, "Unconditional cash transfers (accounting for spillovers) ... "
No chicken dinner but happy hands ... have won another writing contest! Chosen as the winning entrant of the Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest.🎉
"Your story was chosen from among many excellent entrants, and I am very excited to publish it."
Joe Maita, Editor/Publisher
The visual appearance is anchored in the 'retro' aesthetics of the 19th and early-20th century periodicals that were at the root of the modern spec-fantastic genre.
Let me know what you think.
#writer#writingcommunity#sciencefiction#story
Thrilled to share the launch of Sci Phi Journal's 2026 Spring issue, which includes my newest SF story 'The Minutes Of Scale'.
https://t.co/ywqqsgEeL9 is available in 2 complementary manners:
Sci Phi Journal is on a mission to expand the frontiers of speculative fiction, and does so with a commitment to revive the halcyon editorial and literary traditions of classic SF.