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Letter: Fear a future of 'radical abundance' under AI

Published 2 July 2025

From Carl Zetie, Raleigh, North Carolina, US

We should be grateful that AI companies aren’t, in fact, on the brink of ushering in an era of “radical abundance”. Based on all the evidence of innovations in technology over the past few decades, this wouldn’t result in a “golden era” for humankind, but instead create more obscenely wealthy individuals overseeing crushingly powerful corporations while everybody else toils for minimum wage or is unemployed(21 June, p 10).

We already live in an era of abundance: there is plenty to go around; the problem is that it doesn’t. Society is nearing a crisis of systemic inequality. Perhaps we should focus on fixing that before wasting time on implausible talk of large language models as harbingers of superintelligence.

Issue no. 3550 published 5 July 2025

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