AI will make the ‘tech bro’ class even richer, Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz says, just as it can take your job

Tech bros are seemingly everywhere. They’re Hollywood’s newest favorite villain. They pushed back and potentially won this week when President Donald Trump indefinitely postponed an Executive Order on AI. Yes, the broligarchy have been quickly amassing money and power for a while now, but as professor Joseph Stiglitz sees it, the tech at the heart of their careers might push them into an even greater stratum of wealth.

Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University who has spent his career studying how aspects of capitalism fail. He’s studied financial crises, globalization’s broken promises, and the slow hollowing out of the American middle-class. Now, at 83, he is watching AI potentially do the same thing.

“If we don’t do anything about managing AI, there is a threat that it will lead to more inequality,” Stiglitz said. “And since inequality is such a bad, serious problem in our society, that is a great concern to me.”

AI lets firms strip labor out of production, concentrate profits at the top, and push the risks of transition onto workers and the public—exactly the trajectory the Nobel laureate warns about in his 2024 book, the recently reissued The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society. The economics professor argued in an interview with Fortune, AI is emerging as a textbook case of how technology can turbocharge inequality.

The ‘tech bros’ are pulling up the ladder

The very people driving AI adoption are simultaneously leading the charge to shrink the governmental institutions that could cushion AI’s disruption. This became most evident this week, as referenced above after tech billionaires like David Sacks, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg........

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