Sources and Notes

The admit rate of about 11 percent is U.S. News, as reported by mbaMission; Harvard does not publish it. The school's Class of 2027 profile lists 9,409 applications and 943 enrolled students.

Among graduates seeking jobs, 5 percent had no offer three months after graduation in 2022 (Poets&Quants), 15 percent in 2024 (Harvard Crimson) and 10 percent in 2025. Offer rates rebounded in 2025 and median base pay hit a record $185,000 (Poets&Quants, Fortune).

The founder share by class, 8 percent in 2021 to 17 percent in 2025, is from the same employment reports.

India's extreme poverty rate fell from 27.1 percent in 2011-12 to 5.3 percent in 2022-23, about 269 million people, at the $3.00 a day line (World Bank Poverty and Equity Brief).

Over the same years India rolled out the Aadhaar digital ID, opened hundreds of millions of first bank accounts under Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (from 2014), saw cheap mobile data arrive with Jio in 2016, and launched UPI instant payments in 2016. The article says these happened as poverty fell, not that they alone caused it.

In India, most of the decline was rural: rural extreme poverty fell from 18.4 percent to 2.8 percent over the same years (same World Bank brief). The $3.00 line is per person per day, in 2021 prices adjusted for purchasing power.

Close to 800 million people in China left extreme poverty after 1978 (World Bank, Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China, 2022).

China's extreme poor were overwhelmingly rural farm households. The World Bank report credits rising farm productivity, industrialization and urbanization (farm workers moving to factory and city jobs), and infrastructure, alongside policy reforms. Hybrid rice, developed in China in the 1970s, and wider use of chemical fertilizer raised harvests. The article says these tools helped, not that they alone did it.

Farm work fell from 41 percent of the U.S. workforce in 1900 to 1.9 percent in 2000 (USDA Economic Research Service, The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy).

Output per person, in 2011 dollars, from the Maddison Project Database 2023: United States $8,038 in 1900, $10,695 in 1930, $45,886 in 2000 and $58,487 in 2022; Britain $3,397 in 1811 and $7,594 in 1900. Output per person is used here as the standard measure of living standards; it is not the same as wages.

Keynes coined "technological unemployment" and predicted living standards four to eight times as high within a hundred years (a rise of 300 to 700 percent). America's output per person rose about 450 percent from 1930 to 2022, from $10,695 to $58,487 (5.47 times) in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, 1930. The Luddite movement began in 1811.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word to 1822, in Richard Harrison Black's vocabulary book, a guide to word origins for students. There, superintelligence sits in a list beside animals and men: a higher mind above both, with no machine in sight. In 1965, I. J. Good described the ultraintelligent machine. In 1998, Nick Bostrom published How Long Before Superintelligence?, and in 2014 the book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. In 2024, Ilya Sutskever founded Safe Superintelligence.

Jasper is an AI writing assistant. It launched in January 2021 as Conversion.ai, became Jarvis in mid-2021, and took the name Jasper in January 2022 after a trademark warning from Marvel. That put it in paying customers' hands nearly two years before ChatGPT. It ran on OpenAI's GPT-3 large language model; Jasper built the app, OpenAI built the model. Rivals included Copy.ai, Writesonic and Rytr, all built on GPT-3. Boss Mode, launched June 29, 2021, was its top plan, about $119 a month for unlimited words.

Musk's post appeared on X on September 24, 2026, about SpaceX's AI effort, then three years old against six for Anthropic and ten for OpenAI. METR's Time Horizon 1.1, published January 29, 2026, measures the length of software task a model can finish on its own at a 50 percent success rate. Across 2019 to 2025 that length doubled about every seven months. Since 2023 the doubling time is about 131 days, close to four months. By February 2026 the leading model's horizon was about 14.5 hours, most of a skilled engineer's working day. METR notes the confidence intervals are wide.

The PhD baseline of 69.7 percent on GPQA Diamond is from Epoch AI. Model scores: Gemini 3.1 Pro 94.3 percent, GPT-5.2 about 92.4 percent, Claude Opus 4.6 91.3 percent as of February 2026, and GPT-4 about 39 percent in November 2023, per an industry compilation. The analog clock finding, about 50 percent for models versus 90 percent for people, is from the Stanford AI Index 2026. Gemini Deep Think's gold-medal score at the 2025 International Math Olympiad is from Google DeepMind.

August 2026 unemployment of 4.1 percent is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The no-broad-disruption finding is the Yale Budget Lab. The 19 percent gap for 22- to 25-year-olds is Brynjolfsson, Chandar and Chen, Stanford, August 2026 revision. Big Tech new-graduate hiring down about 65 percent from 2019 is SignalFire, June 2026. Entry-level postings down 7.5 percent and senior postings up 14.7 percent in May 2026 is Indeed Hiring Lab. Amodei's warning is from Axios, May 28, 2025. Huang's response is from May 2026.

Computer science founders doubling since 2022 is SignalFire. Lovable's $400 million with 146 employees is TechCrunch, March 11, 2026. Instagram's 13 employees is CNBC.

Business applications are filings for an Employer Identification Number, counted monthly by the Census Bureau's Business Formation Statistics, seasonally adjusted. The 2019 average was 293,134 a month. The prior record was the pandemic spike of July 2020. The 2026 average through August is 524,182 a month, and August 2026 came in at 531,728. Annual totals: 3.50 million in 2019, 5.67 million in 2025. The genuine-surge finding is from Decker and Haltiwanger, September 2024. Data retrieved September 25, 2026.

The employer startup rate, 13.7 percent in 1978, 7.6 percent at the 2010 trough, 9.4 percent in 2022 and 9.1 percent in 2023, is computed from the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics. France's 43 percent and India's 37 percent are from the OECD Timely Indicators of Entrepreneurship and India's Ministry of Corporate Affairs as reported by Razorpay Rize. Britain's 10 percent fall in incorporations in the year to March 2025 is Companies House.