Sam Altman: Moore's Law for Everything

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote Moore’s Law for Everything, an essay in which he discusses economic implications of the exponential rate at which AI is improving. As AI replaces more labor and makes goods and services cheaper, he argues that we must shift the focus of taxation away from income and toward capital, to prevent extreme inequality from destabilizing democracies. See his full essay for details of the (US-specific) implementation, in the form of an American Equity Fund and broad land taxes. This reminds me of a discussion we had in my undergrad CS ethics class on “taxing robots” because they replace labor (and taxable income with it). At the time, I argued against this idea because it seems impossible to implement in any sane way — should we tax email (which is free!) because there are no more telegram operator jobs left? Altman’s proposal is a different solution to this same problem, and a pretty interesting one at that — right up there with a Universal Basic Income (UBI).