Prediction Markets, The AI Agent We Really Need, & More on TheOtherMac Special

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

The Amber Mac Show on Canada Talks, SiriusXM.

Amber (0:07)

Hello, and welcome to a very special episode of The Amber Mac Show, where we take a look back at some of the big stories so far in what has been a very exciting world of tech in 2026 Let's start with Jeff's idea for an agentic AI that we could all get behind.

Jeff MacArthur (0:24)

It seems pretty obvious, regardless of the increasing pushback against AI by many, that we're going to have artificial intelligence agents in our future, whether we want them or not. Big tech leaders from Sam Altman to Elon Musk have claimed that this will lead to a future, perhaps as soon as only five or 10 years from now, where money will no longer be relevant because AI will do everything laborious that humans used to do, coming up with solutions for all our problems along the way. Now, I definitely think that there is no future where the uber wealthy, which definitely includes all of the big tech leaders, will no longer care that they have more money than everyone else. And it's gotten me thinking of a way to get the rest of us on side if AI really is going to be able to solve some of our most important problems. One of my biggest frustrations is that I truly believe humanity has the solutions right at hand for the vast majority of our problems. But the real barrier is just not having enough money to do what's needed to be done in the most efficient and effective way possible. So, may I suggest that an extraordinarily good use for agentic AI is tackling a problem that's in desperate need of solving. Namely, in an age where there are literal trillionaires and yet more than one in ten people go to bed hungry each night, may I propose an agentic AI that is trained and tasked with finding ways to effectively tax the very rich, who we've always been told will find ways to avoid being taxed and so it's possible to tax them more and then employ that AI to collect those taxes. As one of my favorite comedians, Bill Hicks once said, quote, The problem isn't a lack of money, food, water or land. The problem is that you've given control of these things to a group of greedy psychopaths who care more about maintaining their power than helping mankind, end quote. Has that ever rung as true as it does today? So since these extraordinarily rich tech leaders insist on forcing AI on us, with their dubious claims of a better future for all, why don't the rest of us put our thumbs on the scale by leveraging that AI first and foremost to make the extremely wealthy finally pay their fair share? That's an AI agent I could certainly get behind.

I won't get into the specifics of what should be done here, and hey, that's what the AI is for, right? But let's take a look at a few quick stats to back up why this is such a pressing problem. First of all, the US, the richest country in the world, and the one with the most billionaires, has more than one in 10 households living below the poverty line. In fact, between 1989 and 2022, the top 1% of US households saw their wealth grow over 100 times more than the wealth of the median US household. And let's zoom out from the states for a minute with the fact that the dozen richest people in the world own more wealth than the poorest 50% of people on earth. That's 12 people with more wealth than over 4 billion people.

And look at the trajectory of that over time. In 2010, that number was 388 of the richest people. In 2015, it was 80 of the richest people. By 2019, it's 26 of the richest people. And today, as I said, it's 12 people.

That's like each of them making more than over 333 million people, which just sounds like a math error and is definitely not a fair way for the world to exist. And if you're wondering why politicians haven't rescued the rest of us from this, consider that billionaires are more than 4,000 times more likely than your average person to hold political office. And we can see by the number of tech leaders attending Trump's events that they certainly don't even have to hold political office to be politically involved, with Elon Musk being the most brutally obvious example of that.

As former US. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandis said, We can either have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both. And it's pretty easy to see the impact this is having on our society. We're all heading into a future where AI will change our world in a multitude of ways. And if someone could please, please take this idea of AI figuring out how to effectively tax the Uber rich and put it into action, then at least we'll know that at least one of the ways that it's going to benefit the rest of us and not just the wealthiest people on earth, who already have much more than they deserve, will be through a mechanism like this and allow us to pay for the things we need to do.