My work at OpenAI reminds me every day about the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe. Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do. Even more power will shift from labor to capital. If public policy doesn’t adapt accordingly, most people will end up worse off than they are today.
We need to design a system that embraces this technological future and taxes the assets that will make up most of the value in that world–companies and land–in order to fairly distribute some of the coming wealth. Doing so can make the society of the future much less divisive and enable everyone to participate in its gains.
TL;DR; AI revolution will cause social upheavals, and Sam Altman proposes the American Equity Fund to tide over the crisis by creating a policy framework to distribute wealth. It is a variation of “Universal Basic Income” which would place individuals under subservience for handouts. This document is full of suppositions, pseudo economics, and there’s a American equivalent for this “steaming pile of manure”. Yet, I have linked this write up as an example of how not to trust the people trying to take the centre stage for attempting to make AI more humane. It won’t. Nothing would pan out the way it has been described in the document. First, because fundamentals of capitalism are antithetical to wealth distribution and second, AI would nibble away at the fringes first before becoming “part of our lives”.
RadOncNotes 