Observation log, coastal settlement designated "San Francisco." The local hominids have developed a ritual called "retirement wealth," in which a specimen accumulates approximately 20 million shell-tokens and is then permitted to stop pretending to enjoy meetings.
A tribal elder, Deedy Das of the Menlo Ventures hunting party, has issued a public lament: roughly 10,000 members of his cohort have crossed this threshold, while the remainder, earning under 500,000 shells annually, are reportedly suffering. The Trans-Lunar Bureau of Comparative Suffering logs this complaint at 2.3 micro-tragedies per capita.
What fascinates the survey team: the same technology — a probability engine the locals call "AI" — simultaneously enriches one specimen and removes the next specimen's foraging tools. Imagine a spear that feeds the thrower and dissolves the village's other spears mid-flight. The locals describe this arrangement as "kinda nasty." We describe it as Tuesday on at least four prior surveyed worlds.
The specimen Deva Hazarika has noted that the distressed parties "can simply make a choice to be happy," a sentence which, in our records, has never once worked on a hominid.
A software engineer interviewed near a third-wave coffee dispensary stared into a ceramic vessel for an estimated eleven minutes, then said his life's skill was "no longer useful." He continued drinking the bitter liquid. The vessel cost nine shells.
Based on the original article "The haves and have-nots of the AI gold rush".
