> I don't know, the US has been pushing that envelope for 40+ years and people are still paying taxes...

And people can push the "meth consumption" envelope for years before they finally die from it, too.

Getting away with unsustainable practices for X amount of time doesn't prove they're sustainable and won't end in collapse. It just means collapse can take more than X amount of time.

Nothing is sustainable. This is a concept invented to thwart questioning the environmental impacts of industrial activity. "Oh we can do it 'sustainably'".

To claim AI tools will strip out the wealth of the middle class and cause unrest can be disproved by the fact that it was beaten to it by the US corporations by over a generation.

The "middle class" was an invention of post war US to reward the soldiers who fought in Europe and the Pacific. Things are just reverting to a more long (as in multiple centuries) trend behavior of economies. Few haves, lots of have-nots and barely anything in between.

We can only LARP as ubermensch alpha males for so long. Eventually something will give; I suspect it will be a generational divide like none other. Arguably you see the seeds of this already with things like incels opting out of conventional aspirations.