Will capital-havers or capability-havers gain the most from AI?
Imagine, if you will, a world in which pretty much anybody can own a magic lamp, complete with magic genie, for an operating cost on the order of $100/year. The genie isn't all-powerful, but it's perfectly obedient, perfectly benevolent, and very smart. So smart that it can answer any question as approximately well as it's ever been answered.
To whom go the gains in this scenario? People with a lot of money ("capital-havers") or people who ask the best questions ("capability-havers")?
My hypothesis: capability-havers.
Okay, obviously I'm talking about AI here. Further, let's limit this discussion for the moment to near-term transformative AI that doesn't enslave us or kill us all, because otherwise who cares about the future of employment.
Anyways, this cutesy metaphor about magic genies is my response to a certain kind of person online who is utterly convinced that they need to get rich quick as soon as possible because once the post-AI world comes to be, there will be no use for human labor, and the only remaining thing of value will be capital.
Something's missing from this line of reasoning.
For one, not all capital is created equal – dollars aren't the same thing as pounds of steel, acres of land, or grams of lithium.
And what are dollars good for? Well, it depends on the sector. In the software development world, the number one cost is people. In other sectors, such as manufacturing, things like material inputs, energy, transportation, etc., loom much larger. These sectors will respond very differently to a post-genie world.
For today let's focus exclusively on the software sector. Poof, magic genies exist. What happens next?
Well, now you can fire all your engineers if you want. The magic genies are as good if not better at programming, so you can massively cut your costs without curtailing output or quality (this assumes the magic genies live up to the hype, another thing we're just taking for granted). Cool, now we don't need any of those lame programmers with their pesky requests for "weekends off," and complaints about "technical debt" and "deferred maintenance." No time for that nonsense, we've got deadlines to meet and a vision to pursue! The genies are happy to just let us crack the whip and do as they're told, they never say no, and best of all, they work for peanuts.
Now play out the second-order effects. We've fired all our staff, and now the company is just a couple of executives and lawyers ordering magic genies around. The exact same kinds of magic genies that everybody else has. That are incredibly cheap.
The technical term of art for the situation we now find ourselves in is called not having a moat. A more casual way to put it is, "the dust cloud you see rapidly forming on the horizon evidences a band of rapidly approaching competitors hell-bent on violently eating your lunch for breakfast."
All those annoying programmers you just fired? Guess what, they have magic genies too, because genies are cheap. And while you leveraged your genies to fire all your staff, those fired staff members leveraged their genies to fire the concept of having to raise money, which used to be the chief barrier to entry that differentiated wagies from bosses.
At that point, the winner becomes whoever knows how to deploy their magic genies better, a contest that comes down to whoever has a better understanding of the customers' needs and wants and has a better vision for the product. In short the winner of a magic genie contest is whoever asks better questions.
But can't you just ask the magic genies what questions you should ask?
Yes, and this directly proves my point. It will not even occur to many people that this is a question they can ask, and they will be out-competed by everyone who does. And among that latter cohort, they are now on the same equal playing field and the winner will be someone who finds some other edge on top of that basic first move.
Now, I am not saying that money is going to stop mattering, and I'm not saying that this will usher in a glorious end to inequality and class stratified economies. What I am saying is this: in a post-genie world, merely having money is not the advantage it once was, and capital-havers will be forced to pursue new strategies.
Consider that in a pre-genie world, skilled labor is not a commodity. Every worker is unique, some are much better than others, figuring out which is which is time consuming and expensive, and (as Joel Spolsky will tell you) the people you really want, the A-listers, the cream of the crop, are literally never on the market. Having access to money and prestige, in a pre-genie world, is one of several levers you can pull to ensure access to the skilled labor you need.
But when nearly everybody, rich and poor, has the same access to undifferentiated super-talent, competition shifts markedly away from people whose sole advantage is a bag of dumb money.

Again, money will be far from useless; it's just that it will have to be deployed in smarter ways. Chiefly, finding something that remains scarce. Land will certainly remain scarce, as will non-renewable natural resources. Things we can make more of, such as manufactured goods and renewable resources, are by definition less scarce, but they're still valuable commodities to consider. And let's not forget energy, which we will find ever-multiplying uses for.
And if you can't find a natural monopoly to exploit? Make an artificial one. Get your buddies in government to regulate something, or set up a cumbersome licensing regime, and make sure that you're one of the beneficiaries. Competition can't bite at your heels if you just outlaw it!
What else will happen? It may be the case that the investment model currently dominant in the software industry gets totally upended. Silicon Valley style venture capital depends on a few assumptions:
- Expensive barriers to entry
- High risk of failure
- Outsized gains
In a post-genie world that first rung gets completely knocked out because now a startup that used to cost a million dollars to staff can be bootstrapped. Perhaps you can argue that this just raises the bar for performance and software startups will still need access to venture capital in order to secure whatever the post-genie differentiating factors wind up being. That's possible. But it also may be the case that if the VC model survives, it simply abandons software and moves to some other sector where the above three assumptions still hold.
I don't know what capabilities will be in demand in a post-genie world, but I am confident they will exist, and that those who know how to leverage them will stand the most to gain. Assuming this stuff all lives up to the hype, that is.