Scarce Positions of Economic Power Gain from Increasingly Capable AI

A narrative essay follows Ravi, an IIT Madras graduate doing systems implementation for a multinational outsourcing firm in Bangalore, as AI agents take over his team's work and his division is cut by half amid layoffs and unrest. An accompanying overture argues that the massive capital expenditure on machine intelligence is not a bubble, and that as with Gutenberg's press, oil, the transistor and railroads, the wealth created by a transformative technology accrues not to its inventors but to those who control the means of conduction.