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 completely. And maybe not even as dramatically as certain advocates imagine. But enough to make the economics interesting.

If capital can access a meaningful slice of that intelligence without needing the human attached to it, it retains more of the value created. That, to me, feels like one of the more interesting economic propositions hiding underneath AI.  

I don’t disbelieve the human-flourishing proposition. New tech does indeed create wonderful things. But I get sceptical when that’s 90% of the PR narrative. I react the same way when I see a shop selling a €5 can of Coke. I’m not buying it.

YouTube and Instagram feel like a useful precedent. They created genuine new livelihoods and outsized returns for some people. But they also taught millions of people to spend unpaid hours adapting themselves to an algorithm. Both things are true.

Platforms follow the incentives. And so do the creators… but the creators have nervous systems.

The money behind the noise

Most people aren’t spending their evenings thinking about inference economics and model architecture.

And, tbh, why would they?

They’re probably using GPT to talk through a breakup, rewrite an awkward email or ask why their boiler is making a weird noise.

Meanwhile, an extraordinary amount of money has been bet on AI becoming economically significant. That money eventually needs a payoff. 

So I sometimes wonder how much of the headlines, announcements and predictions reflect widespread public fascination. And how much is simply what it looks like when a very large amount of wealth needs something to become important.

The end state

OpenAI and Anthropic have distribution, sure. But so do the companies already sitting inside our digital lives and corporate infrastructure. 

Google. Salesforce. Microsoft. Amazon. On a B2B level, they’re already embedded. And they can build AI too.

Meanwhile, cheaper Chinese models keep pushing down the price of inference. So how comfortable a place is there, ultimately, for a standalone model company like OpenAI or Anthropic?

Model scarcity reduces as intelligence gets cheaper. So they have to become useful enough, sticky enough, and embedded deeply enough to survive if intelligence becomes too much of a commodity.

Maybe they manage it. Or maybe, over time, the distinction between model company and hyperscaler becomes less interesting. For example, if it just becomes another quiet layer of infrastructure.

Which would be such a comically mundane ending to all of this hysteria.

Billions invested. Endless headlines. Predictions about the end of work, the end of creativity, possibly the end of humanity.

And years from now, the “revolution” is three lines buried in a corporate 10-K.

AI becomes part of the hyperscaler furniture.

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.

I guess the dream life for a company is monopoly: jack prices back up while retaining all the cost “efficiencies”. Terrific for shareholders. They can have all that they ever wanted, perhaps even, their parents will finally say they’re proud of them. Whenever I’m seeking meaning in my existence, I remind myself – it’s to create shareholder value.

Who Pays?

Tax optimisation is a clear example of the self-cannibalising instinct. A corporation relies on educated workers, roads, courts, healthcare, public infrastructure, and customers with enough money to buy things. Yet the tax supporting those conditions is treated as a cost to be minimised. Sometimes the money leaves the country altogether. Which is why “shop local” makes sense.

So I get to thinking, sure corporations are great at delivering value, profits, and watches shinier than a Casio. But what condition have the cumulative effects left society in?

Where Does the Money Go?

Imagine an economy with 100 gold coins. It creates five more every year, but four continually find their way to the richest 1%. The economy is growing, technically. But who loses access to the old wealth, and who accumulates enough new wealth to influence the rules governing it?

In my view, the government’s job is to redistribute coins, not only to keep the economy flowing but to maintain social cohesion. After all, aren’t the gov essentially risk managers?

What we Lose?

I don’t quite lean towards a particular ideology, I think about sustainability. How long can this last? And even if the answer is “a long time”, will that long time be a good time?

We’re social animals, wired to cooperate and form relationships. But when resources accumulate in the hands of a few and everybody else adapts to insecurity, we become less generous because generosity feels dangerous, less trusting because one mistake could cost us our home, and more transactional because the surrounding system has taught us that anything can be taken away.

Dignity, trust, community, resilience, and quality of life are harder to put on a spreadsheet, so they’re treated as expendable. The cost of ignoring these intangibles arrive later, dispersed and difficult to attribute: burnout, loneliness, resentment, deteriorating public services, political anger, and the vague feeling that everybody is trying to scam everybody else.

But the question that keeps me from taking the occasional nap is: 

Can a system remain sustainable when its internal incentives steadily undermine social cohesion, distribute gains upward, and convert every human need into an opportunity for extraction?

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.

Back to Bezos. ~$250bn. He owns around 881mn Amazon shares. Currently worth ~$210bn. That’s 84% of his wealth.
This is where it gets awkward. How do you tax someone whose wealth is mostly unrealised gains, without triggering a further tax-planning arms race?
Because if he sells shares, he faces capital gains tax. If he doesn’t, then the gain just sits there. Very large. Very untaxed.

There are also wealthy folks who take out loans against their assets, instead of paying themselves a salary. Because debt isn’t taxable. Even if they’re getting their hands on cash to pay for milk and eggs, they’ve done it without paying income tax first like the rest of society did. That imbalance needs to be addressed. Why should they be able to enjoy community living when they’re intentionally skirting community contributions?

Did you also know that instead of selling shares, and facing capital gains taxes, he could instead gift them to a charity? Such as the Bezos Day One Fund. No capital gains, no money flowing back to communities in a democratic manner. However, lots of personally-directed social power to further causes and narratives he prefers. And maybe even a tax deduction for being so charitable.

Moving on. Countries like Norway, Spain, France, and Switzerland have some form of threshold-based wealth taxes. Norway applies it to global net wealth, whereas France only applies it to real estate. So let’s use Norway as an example of how much the billionaires would “suffer“.

Norway’s wealth tax is applied on a net basis (assets minus liabilities), and is charged at roughly 1%. Meaning a Norwegian Bezos wouldn’t be able to rely only on unrealised gains, loans and charitable structures to avoid contributing to his community.

If his net wealth was $250bn, he’d have to fork out $2.5bn. Which seems like a lot. But consider that wealthy people are usually invested in appreciating and yield-generating assets. As a benchmark, a low-risk money market fund full of US bonds and short-term debt securities is currently yielding around 3.5% per year. On $250bn, that would be $8.75bn in one year. So even after paying $2.5bn in wealth tax, he could still be up around $6.25bn. Seems less dramatic now.
Caveat: In reality, bad market years, illiquid stock, concentration (Bezos’ case), valuation rules, and forced selling all need to be factored in. But their wealth planning teams still using Windows xp can handle that.

If we’re comfortable taxing wages before money even reaches a nurse, teacher, builder, or person renting beside a shower unit, it doesn’t seem insane to require the extremely wealthy to contribute annually at a rate that resembles normal civic obligation.

If their wealth becomes gravity and starts influencing public power, they should probably get a bill for that.

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, sunsets, and investment returns. Lisbon is also the intangible things like family networks, old neighbours, cultural routines, dry humour, saudade, and its hopes.

It becomes a form of exploitation when investors are allowed to bid for a culture nurtured over generations, prune its rough edges, and then sell access to it 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 clear, the danger isn’t tourism itself. 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. You’d only need to look at London, Paris, Geneva, among countless others, to notice how wealth preserved the surface while shifting the life beneath it.

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. 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, is 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?

A city that forgets whom it belongs to might still be beautiful, but it’s already started fading into a memory.

The irony is that I came to Lisbon as part of the very class of people stoking change.

I was raised in London, a city I no longer feel I belong to, and moved here with the kind of mobility many Portuguese people don’t have. I know that makes my concern complicated. I’m inside the problem, trying to live with some awareness of it. But that’s also why I feel it so sharply.

I’ve seen what happens when a city becomes increasingly organised around capital rather than belonging. I’ve seen parallel worlds emerge: one for those with money, mobility, and international networks, and another for the people who carry the place through ordinary life.

In Lisbon, I feel the parallel worlds too: the expat world of specialty coffee, brunch, English-speaking spaces, and aesthetic consumption; and the Portuguese world of families, workers, elderly neighbours, sarcasm, saudade, and the slight twitch of memories from difficult political histories. These worlds occupy the same streets, but they don’t always meet.

I’m learning Portuguese. I read Camões and the country’s history. I feel at home amongst the soulfulness and sarcasm of the Portuguese. In many ways, I feel more kinship here than in the city that raised me. I try, imperfectly, not to treat Portugal as a lifestyle accessory. But I still feel the weight of being grouped with those who arrive without curiosity, humility, or any real desire to belong beyond consumption.

There is a strange loneliness in loving a place while knowing my presence may symbolise something painful to the people from here.

I don’t think growth is inherently wrong. But if Lisbon’s transformation turns the city’s own people into background characters in a prosperity story written for investors, tourists, remote workers, and elites…then that growth has cost too much. A humane society should not ask ordinary Portuguese people to sacrifice their homes, neighbourhoods, and sense of belonging so the country can appear successful from the outside.

I feel for the Portuguese not because I imagine myself morally separate from the problem, but rather because I’ve already lost a version of home to the same problem.

London taught me what happens when ordinary people are priced out of the places that formed them. So when I see Lisbon beginning to split into parallel worlds, I can’t pretend it’s harmless.

I know what this story looks like when it is allowed to continue.


Though I moved to Lisbon with the mobility of a London expat, it wasn’t with a face people usually associate with that world.

Sometimes I feel suspended between the Lisbon of remote workers and the Lisbon of Uber drivers, Glovo riders, and service staff working behind the scenes…people whose presence is relied upon, yet rarely welcomed with the same ease.

I’m close enough to see both, and oftentimes misread by both, but I don’t quite belong to either.

So…even within the outsider class, there are hierarchies.