Other people's money
When I was in high school, I worked at a bakery. I was paid under the table, thirty dollars per shift. The shift was two hours at the cash register, making drinks and sandwiches, boxing pastries, and ringing up everything. Then the store would close, and I would start cleaning the kitchen. If I could finish the cleaning in one hour after we closed, my pay came out to ten dollars per hour, which was close to the minimum wage of $10.25 in Ontario at the time. But if it took me two hours to clean the kitchen, as it often did, then my pay would average to $7.50 per hour, below minimum wage.
For most of my life, I thought about money in this way: ten dollars was an hour of work, and if a book cost $20, that meant two hours of work. If a dress cost $20, that meant two hours of work. If a school trip cost $40, that would be four hours of work. I often asked myself, do I have enough shifts to earn the money to afford this?
While I was applying to universities, I saw the price tag: $4,000 per semester for tuition, $3,000 per semester for residence. How many shifts at the bakery would that mean? More than I could realistically work. When I got admitted, I was offered a 5-digit amount of money as scholarships and grants, more money than I’d ever seen. It was an impossible amount for me to make from my bakery job.
My first internship, during the summer after my first year at university, paid $18 per hour. It was my first non-minimum wage job. I was still using hours worked to measure the value of things, but with my new internship pay, a $20 dress cost one hour of work instead of two. All of a sudden, the amount of time and work that I needed to do to afford something got cut in half.
The summer after my third year, I got a tech internship where one month’s pay covered one semester of tuition; I worked in a nice air-conditioned office with a full shelf of snacks, for no more than 40 hours per week. I thought back to my younger self with the bakery job, and I felt like I’d stepped into a parallel universe where money did not mean the same thing as it once did.
Before I graduated from university, I did two more internships in the tech industry. The jobs were lucrative enough, and I was tight-fisted enough to save up enough money to pay back the loans I’d taken out throughout university. I feel a sense of awe whenever I think back at this – tuition was so expensive compared to my bakery job it was in an entirely different reference class. Without lucrative tech internships, how was I supposed to pay for university when the scholarship ran out?
I was offered a big tech job in New York when I graduated. It was a no brainer for me. Over time, I found myself no longer thinking about the value of things in hourly wages.
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San Francisco’s median house price hit a record $2.15 million this March 2026, up 18% from a year earlier. Condos went up 27%, to $1.36 million. The Compass data behind the Bloomberg story attributed the surge to wealth generated by artificial intelligence startups. There is already a housing price spike in San Francisco because of AI money, before the Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs. We’re about to see several orders of magnitude more money, controlled by a small amount of people, injected into the San Francisco local economy.
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A person making $500,000 a year at an AI lab does not think about money the way I thought about it at the bakery. At that level of income, money is an abstraction, removed from hours and things. It’s a number in a brokerage account, a figure in a spreadsheet. Meanwhile, for the vast majority of people who keep the engine of the world running — making the coffee, cooking the lunch, delivering packages, maintaining the building, and building the data centres — still think about money in terms of physical things or hours worked.
I once found out that a quant trader friend of mine grew up in a lower middle class family, and asked him what it was like for him. “Money just isn’t real anymore,” he told me, “my parents can never understand how much money I deal with on a daily basis.”
In much of the AI community, economic thinking shapes how people relate to the service workers around them: the person taking the retail job, the cleaning shift, the delivery gig is engaged in mutually beneficial trade. They chose this because they’re better off than the counterfactual. Therefore, this is good for them.
I think this frame is valid. Case in point: I myself took a job in New York City on a highly restrictive work visa, trading off some of my freedom for economic opportunities. That being said, I think this economic framing is incomplete. I would like to encourage you, my reader, to step out of this frame for a moment and take a more humanistic approach. Who is this person? Why did they take this job? What is their money situation like? What does their life look like outside this barista job? What does a rent check mean to them, in a city where the cost of living is so high? What does a medical bill mean? Ultimately, how are they doing?
No one can truly flourish if the ecosystem around them does not flourish with them.
The American dream promised that everyone who worked hard could have a good life. However, in today’s America, money can buy advantages in life that no amount of hard work can match: Have a rare disease? Gene therapy cost a few million dollars. Infertile? Gestational surrogacy cost north of $200,000. Want to have designer babies? Embryo selection cost a few thousand dollars per embryo. Reasonable people disagree about the ethics of technologies like these, and I have my own reservations, but for this essay I want to focus only on the affordability aspect. The median wages in California — the wealthiest state in the US — was $50,000 in 2024. How are the vast majority of people supposed to afford these? And if most people cannot afford these, what does that imply about the American Dream? When did “a good life” become a thing money buys?
There’s an argument I hear often: that civilization is, fundamentally, a competition to pass on one’s genes, and that wealth concentration is therefore just nature taking its course. To which I say: an is does not make an ought. The same argument has been used against every moral expansion of the last two centuries: abolition, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, the disability rights movement, the animal rights movement… We can choose moral progress, and we must.
Historically, a small group holding orders of magnitude more wealth and power than its surrounding ecosystem does not end well by default. Just before the French Revolution, the top 1% of France held about 60% of national wealth and the top 10% held roughly 90%. Aristocracy and clergy were almost entirely tax-exempt; peasants and the bourgeoisie paid for everything. Within a few years, the king and queen had been executed and tens of thousands more had been killed in the Terror. Having a small group of people with extreme levels of wealth, when their environments don’t flourish with them, is not sustainable. It also points at the solution: make the environment flourish together.
There are lots of complaints about San Francisco: the housing, the schools, the transit, the homelessness. Now that money is no longer the bottleneck, is it possible to finally fix these afflictions?
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I also want to talk about sustainability. There are two layers to the concept of sustainability. The first is to be cognizant of an organization or ecosystem’s capacity to absorb money in the short term, and not to overwhelm that. Much of the tech industry hired aggressively during the pandemic on the back of injected cash, only to follow with mass layoffs in 2023-24. The second is that the decision-making process itself should hold up over time. There’s a difference between having made a sound decision given all the information but getting unlucky, versus having a bad decision process that cannot survive scrutiny.
There’s a lesson that we can learn from the FTX story: a group of friends, all of whom young and exceptionally brilliant, most of whom were earnestly trying to do good in the world, were isolated in the Bahamas, living together, working together, away from family, away from friends. That was prime, fertile ground for groupthink. Some people justify the FTX story by pointing out that the depositors got their money back, and even made more in the recovery, so this was fine. Within a small group of people who all subscribe to a particular way of thinking, it’s possible to convince everyone of this. However, outside of FTX’s inner ring, once their internal decision-making process was seen by the public, it became clear that what FTX did was fraud.
Every community or organization has groupthink — the line between cohesion and delusion is not clear-cut. The AI community in San Francisco or the frontier labs is no exception. People who will be in control of a massive amount of money are not immune to human fallibility.
One solution to groupthink is to reflect on how the decision making will look to someone very different. How would this look if I presented it to my grandparents? What would a friend, outside my immediate bubble, whose judgment I trust, say to me, if I walked them through this reasoning? How would it read to someone from a different generation, country, or income bracket? Could I write down my reasoning and be comfortable seeing it reported on the front page of the New York Times? When there will be a lot of pairs of eyes on my judgment, can I still stand by my decision?
Lastly, short timelines. Short timelines are such a powerful justification that they can override almost any other principle. I think they function less as an argument than as a kind of psychological pressure. No one knows for certain how short timelines actually are, but I can imagine a rationale that goes: because timelines are short, we need to prioritize accordingly, and that justifies throwing out principles of egalitarianism, responsibility, and duty.
It’s dangerous to let short timelines pressure you into making decisions you would not otherwise make. The premise that the world is about to end carries enormous uncertainty, and is far from certain. Even if we grant the premise, we should still try to build a world where more people can flourish, instead of concentrating wealth among a few, in our remaining time here.
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My last year in university, after I finished up a tech internship in Palo Alto, with enough money to pay for my remaining time in university plus change, I sat next to a school principal on the flight home. After I told him about my internship, his jaw dropped — he was the highest-paid person in his school district and a generation older than me, making the same money as some random intern in tech. I felt guilty thinking about it, even today.
The engine of the world is run by people who think about money in ways, well, normal people think about money. We need to make things go well for them; there isn’t another way.