AI and Robotics: The Ultimate Path to Radical Government Shrinkage AI and robotics are not partisan. They are tools of abundance, governed by physics, code, and incentives rather than ideology. When pursued to their logical extremes—general intelligence, dexterous robots capable of most physical labor, and integrated automation across sectors—they point toward a society with dramatically smaller government and far lower taxes than even the most ambitious small-government advocates have typically proposed. This outcome emerges not from political preference but from technological necessity and economic reality.From Scarcity to Post-ScarcityToday's economies rely on massive government apparatus partly because of scarcity: limited resources, imperfect information, and the high transaction costs of coordinating human labor. Welfare states, regulatory bureaucracies, education systems, healthcare administration, and large militaries exist to manage trade-offs, redistribute resources, insure against risks, and enforce rules amid human limitations. Advanced AI and robotics erode these foundations. Robots and AI systems can perform physical and cognitive work at scales and efficiencies humans cannot match. A mature robotics economy could produce goods and services in such volume that basic material needs—food, housing, energy, transportation, and healthcare—approach zero marginal cost for large populations. Historical productivity gains from mechanization, electricity, and computing already transformed societies; AI multiplies this by orders of magnitude through continuous self-improvement, 24/7 operation, and precision without fatigue or error. In such a world, the rationale for expansive redistribution shrinks. If productive capacity is effectively unlimited and distributed through markets, voluntary mechanisms, or new ownership models (such as widespread equity in AI/robotics capital), the need for complex tax-and-transfer systems diminishes. Poverty becomes primarily a distribution or motivation issue rather than a production one. Programs designed for 20th-century industrial economies become relics.Automating Government ItselfGovernment is labor-intensive. Consider the scale:
Tax collection, compliance, auditing, and entitlement administration employ vast workforces and require enormous oversight.
Regulatory agencies monitor industries, enforce rules, and adjudicate disputes—tasks ripe for AI-driven monitoring, predictive enforcement, and smart contracts.
Education and healthcare delivery involve huge administrative layers that personalized AI tutors, diagnostic systems, and robotic care could streamline or bypass.
Even core functions like defense and policing could see radical efficiency gains from autonomous systems, reducing personnel needs while potentially increasing capability.
A logical endpoint is a government that acts more as a minimalist referee and coordinator than a comprehensive provider or manager. Many services could migrate to decentralized, AI-mediated markets or community systems. Dispute resolution might leverage AI arbitrators with perfect recall of law and precedent. Infrastructure planning could optimize via simulation rather than political logrolling. The residual state focuses on irreducible roles: defining property rights in new domains (data, AI models, orbital resources), preventing force and fraud, and handling genuine externalities that markets struggle with. No major political platform in recent decades has proposed shrinking the federal apparatus to anything approaching this vision. Even limited-government proposals typically aim for marginal cuts or efficiency reforms within the existing framework. Technology enables going further—dramatically so—by making the framework itself less necessary.Taxes in an Age of Radical ProductivityTaxes exist to fund government and influence behavior. In a high-productivity AI/robotics economy, required revenue plummets. If GDP multiplies while core government functions automate, the tax burden as a share of output could fall to levels that would make historical low-tax eras seem burdensome. Dynamic scoring of growth effects would be extreme: each percentage point of automation-driven expansion compounds. Revenue models could also evolve. Land value taxes, congestion fees, or voluntary mechanisms in a wealthy society might suffice. Wealth from AI capital ownership, if broadly distributed through pensions, sovereign funds, or market mechanisms, reduces political pressure for punitive redistribution. The Laffer Curve's peak shifts dramatically upward with growth, but the needed revenue baseline drops. Critics might argue this ignores inequality or displacement. Yet the same technologies that automate jobs also create new opportunities and cheapen life’s necessities. Historical parallels—agricultural mechanization freeing labor for industry, computing creating unforeseen professions—suggest adaptation, especially with tools that amplify human creativity. The policy challenge is transition management, not permanent large government.Beyond PartisanshipThis vision aligns with neither traditional left nor right platforms. It exceeds conventional conservative small-government rhetoric by rendering much of the state optional through abundance rather than austerity. It undermines progressive instincts for ever-expanding administration by making centralized control less competent and less necessary than decentralized intelligence. Implementation requires clear property rights, open innovation, and avoidance of regulatory capture that entrenches incumbents or slows progress. Misuse—surveillance states, AI monopolies enforced by government, or weaponized regulation—could lead elsewhere. The direction depends on choices, but the technological gradient pulls toward efficiency and smaller coercive institutions. AI and robotics expose a deeper truth: many political battles assume fixed scarcity and human limitations. Technology dissolves those assumptions. The resulting society could feature unprecedented individual autonomy, voluntary cooperation, and focus on higher pursuits—exploration, science, art—precisely because the machinery of compulsion and redistribution atrophies.
The logical conclusion is not a prescription for any party but a forecast: pursue capable, safe AI and robotics aggressively, govern the transition wisely, and prepare for a world where government is small because abundance makes it so. No ideology owns this future; reality delivers it.
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) June 23, 2026
I sold my last company AI Factory to Snapchat in 2019 for $166M. Spent 4 years there running GenAI. By 2022, watching TikTok and CapCut break into the top 5 apps in the world, I thought the next billion-dollar creator platform would be a production tool.
And no one in the…
— Alex 🧩 Scaling Video GenAI (@alexmashrabov) June 22, 2026
All of them told us they wanted to have camera control, including angles, movements and techniques with precision.
We hired four of those eight. Put them next to our ML engineers and rebuilt the product around what professionals actually needed.
— Alex 🧩 Scaling Video GenAI (@alexmashrabov) June 22, 2026
Summer 2025: our creative team had invented the viral AI hooks that filled Instagram and TikTok - the satellite camera swoop, the eye zoom, the outfit morph.
Will Smith, Madonna, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, and every top European football club started running content made on Higgsfield…
— Alex 🧩 Scaling Video GenAI (@alexmashrabov) June 22, 2026
None of this happens without the creators and agencies choosing Higgsfield every day, and the team behind it.
We're building a tool that lets you bring your ideas to life, and we're just getting started.
— Alex 🧩 Scaling Video GenAI (@alexmashrabov) June 22, 2026
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) June 23, 2026
Will Surrendering to Iran Relieve Trump’s Gas Pains? Capitulation probably won’t pay off at the polls in November ............ Donald Trump’s rhetoric on Iran oscillates wildly from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour. But Trump has run out of military options that don’t involve huge war crimes, so we seem to be heading for a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz on Iran’s terms. And that includes the imposition of de facto tolls, whatever they are called. ............... There is no mystery about Trump’s surrender: He’s desperate to end the war because he is paying a steep political price for high gasoline prices, and the midterms are only 4 ½ months away. ................ The state of the Strait: Even if the war is truly over, it will take time to return world oil supplies to normal levels. First, there has been substantial damage to the Persian Gulf’s infrastructure, which will take months, if not years, to repair. Second, many oil tankers are now in the wrong place and it will take weeks or months to move them. Third, some shipping channels are at risk from stray mines. Lastly, the world met the Hormuz crisis in part by running down oil inventories, which will now need to be rebuilt. ...................
the oil markets expect oil prices to decline at only a slow rate for the rest of this year
............... Rockets and feathers: There is a well-documented pattern to how the price of gasoline responds to changes in the price of crude oil. When there is a global shock that causes the price of crude oil to soar, gasoline prices rise like a rocket. But when the crisis is over and crude prices plunge, the price of gas declines only gradually — it drifts down like feathers. ................ the economy is delivering inflationary shocks independent of the war. Notably, the AI/datacenter boom has driven a rapid rise in electricity prices and huge increases in the prices of memory chips, which are used in almost all consumer electronics, from smartphones to laptops to game consoles. The AI boom has also pushed up interest rates on mortgages and consumer loans. Oh, and Trump’s cuts to Obamacare subsidies are causing many Americans’ health insurance costs to soar. ...................... So will Trump’s surrender to Iran rescue him and his party from a blue wave in November? It’s very unlikely. I suggest they find themselves some lifejackets.
Class Warriors, Class Worriers, and Class Wimps Democrats must take on America's oligarchs. Here's how. ........... The last time Americans faced such overwhelming evidence that the monied interests were screwing them over was the Great Crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression, resulting in the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, starting in 1933. ................ The one silver lining of the current Trump-Musk-Bezos-Ellison-Murdoch-Koch horror show is that most Americans now know beyond any reasonable doubt that they’re on the losing side of a class war, and are justifiably pissed .................... America’s first trillionaire is a vicious white supremacist who’s stirring up hate around the world and backing Republican candidates with big bucks. American billionaires, meanwhile, are openly sucking up to America’s first dictator, spending lavishly on whatever he wants, and gobbling up media outlets so most Americans won’t know what’s going on. ................. Workers’ share of the nation’s income has now dropped to the lowest it’s been since records began in 1947, while profits’ share is the highest since 1950 (showing up in a rip-roaring stock market). ..................
“Income from capital risks replacing income from labor,” Pope Leo wrote in Magnifica Humanitas, his recent encyclical letter.
................. taxing great wealth, busting up monopolies, strengthening labor unions, raising the minimum wage, demanding profit-sharing and capital-sharing, ensuring Medicare for all and a universal basic income, and getting big money out of politics. .................
FDR wasn’t afraid to be a class warrior: “Never before in all our history have [the monied interests] been so unified against one candidate as they stand today,” he thundered in 1936. “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”
..................... But these days, most Democratic politicians are reluctant to take on the oligarchs. Other than Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Zohran Mamdani, who else is loudly doing it? ................... Instead of being class warriors, many Democratic politicians are class worriers. They openly worry that inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity are out of control — but they won’t fight for what must be done. I’m talking about Third-way “moderate” Democrats who focus on “suburban swing” voters. and Washington-based consultants who urge Democratic candidates to move to the “center.” .................. Some Democrats are simply class wimps, so afraid of offending the monied interests that fund their campaigns they won’t even support modest reforms. ................. With inequality at levels never before seen, with a racist trillionaire and scores of billionaires poisoning our politics, with corporate profits at record heights while most American workers struggle harder than ever just to stay afloat, with a Republican majority in Congress slashing Medicaid and food stamps to finance a tax cut for the super-rich, with the looming threat of AI destroying jobs, and with one of the most brazenly corrupt politicians in American history now occupying the Oval Office — with all of this, Democrats should be at least as loud as they were under FDR. .......... The Democratic Party must seek to return to the American people the wealth and power that the obscenely rich have taken from them. This should be the core Democratic message. It explains the affordability crisis. It reveals the epidemic of corruption. It clarifies corporate welfare and crony capitalism. It shows what must be done.
— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) June 22, 2026
Silicon Valley wants you to think this and that’s why you are going to focus on building your product for years before hitting the market. And then once you finally do, you realize all the time was wasted and no one wants it.
There are two kinds of founders: Those who start with a bold idea and learn the business skills along the way, and those who already have the business instincts and are simply hunting for the right idea.
Some personal news. After nearly 7 years leading WhatsApp, I'm excited to share who will take over the responsibility of delivering simple, reliable, and private messaging for the world. WhatsApp is in the strongest position it's ever been — and that felt like the right moment to…
anthropic is assembling the most cracked team in tech
in the past 18 months, they've hired: - peter bailis (workday cto) - bryan mccann (you com cto) - mike krieger (instagram co-founder) - sam ghods (box cto) - henry shi (super cto) - niki parmar (adept ai cto) - karpathy… https://t.co/4ajTzort0r
