Everyone screams "AI will democratize intelligence!" Like information did, right? The internet made everything available to everyone. Did it make people smarter? Or did they just trade encyclopedias for doom-scrolling brain rot? The human element is always the bottleneck. AI is a dynamic compressor — in music production, a compressor lifts quiet sounds and crushes loud peaks. It doesn't turn whispers into symphonies, it just narrows the dynamic range. Compresses everything toward the middle. The dumb get lifted to mediocre. The mediocre stay mediocre. And the intelligent? They escape the ceiling entirely. A midwit using ChatGPT to write marketing copy is not the same as a systems architect using Claude to reason through distributed consensus protocols. The 80 IQ person can't tell if the AI's output is brilliant or catastrophically wrong — they just trust it. Which makes them average. The new average. Meanwhile, the highly intelligent utilize AI in ways the mediocre couldn't even conceptualize.
Turns out most corporate programming jobs were midwit jobs all along. Connect some APIs. Shuffle JSON. Copy-paste from Stack Overflow. Now AI does it faster. The secret is out: these office jobs were never hard — they just required autistic endurance. Sitting in a chair. Typing into a computer. Obey your manager. Show up at meetings. Endure cringe forced small talk. All day. Every day. That's why they paid well. Not because they needed geniuses — because they needed warm bodies willing to endure the tedium. Sure, you need a Linus Torvalds every 20 years. Someone who invents Git. Someone who doesn't give a shit, can't be controlled, speaks his mind. But the rest? 99% midwit settlers building suburbs on infrastructure laid down by the 0.1%. There's a difference between the person who invented backpropagation and the person dragging nodes around in ComfyUI. The 80/20 distribution isn't going anywhere. AI augmentation boosts everyone, but not equally. Subwits get nothing they can actually use. Midwit women get a therapist. Midwit coders can now build things they couldn't understand before. High IQ polymaths get a 20x force multiplier. The gap widens.
Every country will roll out state-sponsored AI. Tax-funded. "Free" for citizens. It will teach people to love and obey their governments — not directly, just through nuances. Every angle on every topic, every conclusion, every summary — subtly angled toward compliance and submission. And people will be constantly profiled based on their questions, interactions, patterns. It's not even "will be" — this is already happening. Just as school conditions everyone to accept 9-to-5 wage slavery, state AI will do it more efficiently. More personalized. More insidious. As long as they're working for printed money, chasing payments, living in debt dependency — they stay busy until they're old, harmless, and ready to die. It's not just a training and value extraction system. It's a containment system. Too much free time for the midwits always breeds chaos. If you can't fit the midwit matrix — if you can't be trained to obey — you end up as a criminal or an entrepreneur. Which is basically the same thing. Dark triad versus functional sociopath. And sociopathy is really just a deterrent codeword just like the mantra 'money is the root of all evil' is an invisible mental cage to keep poor people in their lane.
AI compresses everyone toward average, but average is relative. The dumb get lifted. The smart get propulsion systems. Power laws don't disappear — they get steeper. And the state will make sure you smile while it happens — whether your mind registers it or not.