I keep thinking about AI in a slightly unfashionable way.

That one of its economic functions is to let capital access skilled intelligence more cheaply, without returning quite as much of the value created to the person who possesses the intelligence. Which means, awkwardly, wealth gets better access to intelligence while the people providing it get less access to the wealth it creates. 

I genuinely don’t seek out these connections. I’ll be casually reading Sally Rooney before bed. Geranium mist in the air. Peppermint tea within arm’s reach. Then my brain says, “Oh, you thought we were done for the day?”

The pattern

This is what I notice. UK companies moving from defined benefit pensions to defined contribution schemes, aka contingent liabilities becoming predictable expenses. Offshoring. Gig workers. Shared service centres. Leasing instead of owning infrastructure. Customer self-service.

Consider ordinary customer experiences: checkouts. Returns. Online check-ins. Banking. Booking. Things that once upon a time required somebody’s paid time now quietly requires ours. But like, unpaid.

All different mechanisms, but the same direction of travel.

There’s always been an incentive for businesses to reduce overheads, make costs more predictable and pay less for what they need. I don’t think there’s a particular villain story here. Mostly, it’s incentives doing what incentives do.

The human attached

Intelligence has historically been stubbornly attached to a person. You needed the lawyer. The analyst. The programmer. The designer. The person who knew things, noticed things, could reason through things.

And because the intelligence came with a human attached, some of the wealth created by that ability flowed back to the human. 

AI changes that bargain. Well… not as dramatically as certain advocates imagine. But enough to make the economics interesting.

Absolute gems occasionally emerge from Spotify Radio. And my music taste has always felt a little like emotional cinematography, a way of changing the lighting to turn everyday moments into something more reflective, beautiful, and slightly filmic. 

Today I found ‘When the Day Is Over’ by twominds, and it flooded my mind with visuals… of falling in love. Falling into that peculiar state where the world tilts slightly in your favour and ordinary life starts glowing around the edges.

I promise I’m not naive. I think.

People fall out of love too. Sometimes quickly, and often for perfectly understandable reasons. But I don’t regret the times I’ve fallen into it, because they’ve made life feel more remarkable.

I’ve had plenty of conversations with people who describe relationships as almost adversarial, yet somehow I haven’t wavered. If anything, they’ve made me more certain of the kind of love I want to practise. Life is too short, and tbh too pretty, to be a fortress.

And I’ll let Hollywood keep the grand gestures, the airport sprints and declarations in the rain. What I daydream about is much smaller.

Bringing her coffee in bed after a late night. 

Noticing when moments call for sharing the load. Sometimes that’s a packed lunch to save her time. Sometimes it’s snacks. Sometimes it’s space.

A hand against her waist as I walk past. Maybe a kiss casually on her head.

Catching each other’s eye across a busy room and having an entire conversation without speaking.

Bookshop afternoons, returning with an irresponsible number of books, then lying tangled together in bed, quietly reading separate stories.

Obsessing hard about ideas and exploring thoughts and feelings together, usually laced with dry humour.

Cups of tea on the sofa while raindrops tap against the windows. Not much to say, but nowhere else to be either.

There’s movement too.

Late-night walks through the city. Being the insufferably cute locals at a café. Christmas markets in Prague. Cheering at breakdancing competitions. Wandering into moments rather than observing them from the sidelines. The kind of impulse that makes Chuck Krantz start dancing when he hears the drummer.

Encouraging her towards opportunities that excite but also frighten her. Being a stable home without becoming her entire world. Having our own friends, interests and private corners, but occasionally opening the doors and inviting each other inside.

All of this imagery from a three-minute song. All these tiny possibilities that appear when two people, with their own distinct lives, make space for one another. Turning toward each other with affection, curiosity, and attention. Living for small moments as much as the big ones. 

What I’ve described already exists as memory, instinct, and the way I know how to love. Maybe that’s what I’m learning to hold onto when I’m on my own: that this capacity is still in me, nowhere urgent to go, just ready to be met when the time comes.

And goddamn, does it make me feel alive.

Capitalism does some things well. The speed of innovation, the breadth of creativity, the streamlined practices. But it comes at a cost, at least eventually.

I think it’s a self-cannibalising system, bad at preserving the conditions from which value is extracted. It optimises so well that things lose their souls. Btw part 1 is here.

Decisions can be rational for one company while becoming disastrous when every company makes them. Cut staff. Reduce quality. Remove anything that can’t be directly linked to revenue. Minimise tax. Each makes sense on its own spreadsheet. But together they produce exhausted workers, hollowed-out public services, brittle supply chains, and customers who can’t afford to be customers 

The Race to the Bottom

Competition ignites a race to the lowest price, sacrificing staff and quality or using tax wizardry. You’d think corpos could focus on offering the best service, but humans prefer simpler choices and lower prices, a preference reinforced, ironically so, by the precarious jobs created by the same optimisation.

When rent, food, energy, and childcare costs are rising, you’re not spending evenings considering the long-term social consequences of your summer holiday airline choice. You’re clicking “sort by lowest price” and hoping the wings are included.

Ryanair always looks cheap until you want luggage, leg mobility, or to sit next to your baby, partner, or grandma. I’m convinced there’s a way to go yet: a discount for passengers guiding the plane to its bay,  or popping on a high vis to drive fellow passengers to the terminal.

It feels like “tax the billionaires”, or the more poetic “eat the rich”, became more mainstream post-pandemic. And I think it’s because public services, and quality of life for regular folk, was noticeably worsening.

So, would mainstream anti-billionaire sentiment exist if economic stability and social mobility was easily accessible for all? E.g. was the sentiment alive between 2000-2007?

If no, and stay with me here, is it the billionaire that directly led to underfunded public services and lower quality of life? Probably not. Yet indirectly, via regulatory capture, probably yes. The more they accumulate, the more they influence to accumulate further. Eventually wealth becomes gravity.

And so to the notion of taxing billionaires, using Jeff Bezos as a convenient example. He’s worth ~$250bn. Enough to buy a kebab every second for nearly 8,000 years.

Tax, by the way, became an ugly word that made people run away to Dubai. Normally though, people agree to live in communal areas, and they contribute to keep that area pretty and the community’s needs served. Now scale that thought up to a national level. That’s what tax is supposed to do. It’d cost a libertarian a ton of time and money to train and equip themselves as a firefighter, or road repairer…compared to a community pooling together for a specialised, cost-efficient and resource-efficient team.
Caveat: This is for cities. I can’t speak for remote regions until I’ve completed my Walden life chapter.

Having said that, I can understand why people flinch at tax. For many young people, the social contract has been broken. They might think, “why is a third of my tax bill going to pensioners, some of whom are sitting on immense property wealth, while I have to pay exorbitant amounts to rent a windowless room with a DIY shower unit assembled near my bed? And my calathea is dying”. Tax has negative optics now because trust in public institutions is low.

I used to think, “thank god physical disciplining in schools went away and the experience was safer for kids”.

Then I thought, well if some kids are getting abused at home, like they were previously, it just gives their trauma room to manifest in that safer school environment. Where the ugliest manifestations can hinder schooling more than physical disciplining would’ve.

Then I thought, but maybe if that safer school environment could now also treat kids as humans pending discovery of some form of intelligence I.e. who are the builders, movers, thinkers, performers, carers, strategists, artists?

I realised that the factory of schooling has remained the same, minus some cruelty.

And I wondered, “why did we stop halfway on the journey to giving kids dignity?”

Lisbon isn’t just about its beautiful tiles, food scene, and sunsets. There’s also the intangible things like family networks, old neighbours, cultural routines, saudade, and its hopes.

It becomes a form of exploitation when investors are allowed to bid for a culture nurtured over generations, prune the rough edges, and then sell access for maximum profit…rendering it beautiful, but hollow. Meanwhile, those who created much of its value are left with higher rents, weaker communities, and a growing sense that their own country no longer has room for them.

But at least it enriches a narrow class /s

To be crystal clear, I don’t think tourism itself is the danger. Tourism brings money, jobs, visibility, and cultural exchange. The danger is this modern extractive form of it. And it doesn’t take much imagination to consider the consequences. I’d only need to look at London (where I was born and raised) to notice how wealth preserved the surface while the life beneath it can feel precarious.

I write this seemingly naively, as if private equity and wealthy investors are merely oblivious to the effects of their quarterly goals. Unfortunately, and with great insomnia, I know it’s a business model: privatise the gains and socialise the losses (i.e. the intangible negative externalities). All enabled by regulatory capture, political incentives, and a dash of scorn that community isn’t as profitable as individual isolationism.

I can’t seem to pinpoint moral imagination anymore. It’s quiet. I struggle between accepting accumulation as an inevitable human impulse, and whether surrendering to that conclusion is a kind of defeat itself. Greed often feels more powerful than kindness, because it’s easier: easier to take than to care, easier to extract than to preserve, easier for a few determined people to damage what many gentler people are trying to protect.

I don’t think a country should measure success primarily by how much capital it attracts, or how much property appreciates. Surely a humanistic approach, which, correct me if I’m wrong, relates to what we are, would be: can its young people afford to live near their family? Can an elderly resident remain in the neighbourhood they know? Can workers in the tourism economy build stable lives from the wealth they help generate? Do local people feel included in the future of their own city?