In this futurist presentation to a professional services audience, Zack Kass outlines four rapid, AI‑driven forces that he believes will dramatically cut material suffering. First, the advent of AGI will unleash massive scientific breakthroughs—curing cancer, Alzheimer’s, achieving fusion, and even interstellar travel—by concentrating the world’s top researchers in a virtual “room” for decades. Second, AI will strip away the computational and bureaucratic “cruft” built into modern professions, freeing workers from over‑work and low job satisfaction; productivity will soar and people will regain time for what truly matters. Third, today’s luxuries—high‑quality education, primary‑care, and other professional services—will become ubiquitous staples through AI‑powered tutors and physicians, making them affordable for everyone, even children without internet access. Fourth, the resulting efficiency and deflation will drive down the cost of goods and services, expanding real purchasing power and lifting the bottom‑income class to unprecedented levels. Kass frames these trends as inevitable, fast‑moving, and transformative for both individuals and the broader economy.
Chapters
All right, this is my favorite part because this is what I believe in and this is what I talk a lot about. There are going to be four things that happen to reduce material suffering, and I think they're going to come fairly fast and furious. The first is scientific breakthroughs. This is just going to happen. We're going to cure cancer, we're going to cure Alzheimer's, we're going to solve the fusion problem. We're probably going to solve interstellar travel. The list goes on. If you want to know what it might look like, just imagine putting 10 million oncology research, the 10 million best oncology researchers you could imagine in a room for 100 years. That's probably what this looks like when we achieve AGI, and it's going to be pretty incredible. The second thing that's going to happen is a massive boom in worker productivity and job satisfaction. And this audience is going to be particularly fun to explain this to. Every time I go somewhere, I ask people, what percentage of your job do you love? I won't ask you all, but it's rough in professional services. I don't need to tell you. I mean, this is probably one of the most affluent socioeconomic groups that I will speak to all year. And I bet you rank near the bottom in total job satisfaction, sadly. And that's just like. I don't. I hope I'm not saying something that's deeply offensive, but I have friends who are attorneys, and by the time they become partner, by the time they make it right now that, you know, now their life can be lavish. They're just spent. They're just exhausted, and they're like, yeah, I guess I'll be a parent now. I don't know. That's really bad. That's just really bad. We have created, by the way, it's not just legal services. I don't mean to pick on you all. We have created a lot of computational cruft in this world in the name of professional advancement and career paths. And the result is that we are basically overworked, unsatisfied, and we are losing touch with the things that actually matter most to us. Because if I go on in the crowd and I say to you, what. What do you care about deeply? What do you actually care about? You're gonna say your friends and your family, your children, your hobbies. You're not gonna say, you're fucking brief. It's just not the thing you care most about right now. And it may matter a lot. It matters a lot. I'm not suggesting Your profession doesn't. But the things that root you in, what you care about, aren't actually related to your job. And this is why more than anything, we are gonna see a massive increase in job satisfaction because we're gonna start strip people of the things, the cruft that we have built in these systems. And that's going to be really exciting. That's going to be really exciting. And then from a worker productivity standpoint, I mean, gosh, companies are going to have the liberty to do a lot of things with newfound margin. And I for one believe that the market is going to operate pretty efficiently. And I think we're going to distribute that all over. The third thing that's going to happen and this is not a hot take, it happens every time. Luxuries are going to become staples. The reason that everyone in this room gets to wear these beautiful nice suits, the reason that we all get to have these incredible computers at our hands, the reason that I get stand up here and fly home tomorrow is that we've advanced far enough that the things that were once luxuries in our lifetime, for many of us in our lifetime, things that would not have been accessible to most of us are now accessible to us because that's how technology moves us forward. This is going to happen at an incredible rate. It is not hard to imagine in our lifetime, let alone the next three years probably that children with access to the Internet or even without will have access to AI powered tutors that know what they know, how they like to learn, can talk to their friends and family about their progress. It's not hard to imagine that everyone in this world will have access to an AI powered primary care physician to help them route the problems that they may face. And by the way, I think that scales to specialist, I'm picking the lowest hanging fruit. But the things that we hold as luxuries today, high quality education and primary care doctors I think becomes accessible to everyone. And the last is deflation. I think the cost of goods and services plummets and basically everyone except the central banks loves this news. The power, the spending power should skyrocket and in effect move the bottom class up further than we've ever seen.
