AI will make the rich unfathomably richer. Is this what we want? (www.theguardian.com)

Palantir’s recent Q2 — over $1 billion in revenue, 48% year‑over‑year growth and 93% expansion in U.S. commercial sales — is being framed as proof that AI is already remaking business. That surge, along with claims from OpenAI that LLMs can “write an entire computer program,” underpins massive investor bets: roughly 500 AI “unicorns,” 29 newly minted AI founders who are billionaires, and hundreds of billions in public and private capital (Congress-approved hi‑tech funding ~$280B in 2022; $230B private AI investment in 2024; another ~$320B planned this year). The technical trajectory — large language models automating coding, self‑driving vehicles, robotic warehouses, “lights‑out” factories and automated service kiosks — promises huge productivity gains but also rapid displacement across white‑ and blue‑collar jobs, concentrating returns in a tiny ownership class. For the AI/ML community this is a double‑edged signal: the technology’s capability to displace labor is precisely why markets are pricing it so highly, creating political and social externalities — rising inequality, political capture by tech elites, attention/mental‑health harms from pervasive automation and platform design, and the risk of a speculative bubble. The piece argues for rebalancing policy and engineering priorities toward social goods: invest in labor‑intensive infrastructure, design AI to augment rather than replace work, and engage with regulation and redistribution to ensure AI-driven gains aren’t just an “efficient upward redistribution” of wealth.