The essay arguing that if AI does everything, even the billionaires become pets
Fernando Borretti follows one chain of logic to a bleak end: when machines do all cognitive and physical work, workers, the wealthy, and even heads of state all become economically unnecessary — and unnecessary people don't keep their power. “Sam Altman? How many divisions does he have?”
The argument: capital protects you only while the state needs the value humans create. Strip that out and property rights are whatever an AI-run state decides to honor. The rich, Borretti claims, “just don't have that much political power” once they're materially redundant.
The thread's best rebuttal isn't optimism — it's that the essay smuggles in its conclusion, quietly upgrading “can do all work” to “runs autonomously, has its own goals, is conscious,” until the doom is just a tautology.
One chain of dominoes, knocked all the way down
Fernando Borretti's essay runs a single argument to its end. If AI matches or beats humans at all cognitive and physical work, corporations replace workers, social mobility ends “because there are no more talent ladders to climb,” and then — the unexpected turn — the wealthy lose too. Capital is power only because the state needs the value humans currently produce; remove that, and “the state doesn't need to keep any of those people happy, because they don't matter.” The rhetorical knife: “Sam Altman? How many divisions does he have?” Even alignment offers no exit — Borretti doubts “a superhumanly intelligent being [would be] happy to work as a butler to talking primates, forever.”
The crux the thread actually engaged
The most serious reader didn't reject the premise; he sharpened it. A software engineer at AMD located the real load-bearing claim in incentives, not robot rebellion:
“the AI can be 100% aligned to follow human instructions, and we'd still end up unable to control the AI because every human who can has an incentive not to, while also having an incentive to prevent anyone else from controlling the AI.”
That version is more disturbing than the essay's, because it needs no conscious machine, only ordinary human self-interest plus a tool too powerful to share.
Where the argument cheats
The dismantling came from spotting a silent escalation. One reader traced how the essay starts from “AI can do all work, cheaper than humans” and then “silently layer[s] on 'and can run autonomously, indefinitely,' then … 'operate independently of any instructions,' and finally … 'has emotions, has moral values, is a conscious being.' What's left is tautology.”
Others reached for history as ballast. A skeptic bet on “a few thousand years of history” over “yet another blogger claiming … this time is different,” expecting an Industrial-Revolution-shaped bumpy road rather than human extinction-by-irrelevance. And Kartik Agaram named the genre flaw: the piece is a cartoon thought experiment where every actor is frozen into the one motive the author assigns them — “people have agency,” including the agency to read this and act differently. The essay's power and its weakness turn out to be the same thing: it only works if nobody in the chain ever pushes back.
Get breakdowns like this every day
The top Hacker News stories, unpacked — by email, Telegram, or RSS.
Imaging a living brain through the skull with ultrasound and a cloud of microbubbles
Aleph claims the most detailed vascular image of a human brain ever taken with ultrasound through an intact skull, plus reconstructions of what a subject was looking at. Two brain-imaging specialists in the thread say the skull doesn't let ultrasound do that.