Economists Branko Milanovic and Nils Gilman argue that AI will destabilize the small class of Americans who earn high salaries while also holding large investment portfolios, forcing one of two outcomes: that class calcifies into a self-perpetuating hereditary aristocracy, or educational credentials lose their wage premium and the class dissolves into pure rentiers. They contend that either path collapses the meritocratic justification for existing inequality, potentially replacing it with a feudal-style pyramid of a tiny ultra-wealthy peak, a thin service class, and a large economically redundant population.
