The best way to improve capitalism is to enable everyone to benefit from it directly as an equity owner. This is not a new idea, but it will be newly feasible as AI grows more powerful, because there will be dramatically more wealth to go around. The two dominant sources of wealth will be: (1) companies, particularly ones that make use of AI, and (2) land, which has a fixed supply.
~ Sam Altman
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Capitalism is a powerful engine of economic growth because it rewards people for investing in assets that generate value over time, which is an effective incentive system for creating and distributing technological gains. But the price of progress in capitalism is inequality.
~ Sam Altman
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A stable economic system requires two components: growth and inclusivity. Economic growth matters because most people want their lives to improve every year.
~ Sam Altman
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In a zero-sum world, one with no or very little growth, democracy can become antagonistic as people seek to vote money away from each other. What follows from that antagonism is distrust and polarization. In a high-growth world the dogfights can be far fewer, because it’s much easier for everyone to win.
~ Sam Altman
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“Moore’s Law for everything” should be the rallying cry of a generation whose members can’t afford what they want. It sounds utopian, but it’s something technology can deliver (and in some cases already has).
~ Sam Altman
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The best way to increase societal wealth is to decrease the cost of goods, from food to video games.
~ Sam Altman
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The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we’ve made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel. We have already built AI systems that can learn and do useful things. They are still primitive, but the trendlines are clear.
~ Sam Altman
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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.
~ Sam Altman
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In a very deep sense, I think the biggest miracle that we need to create the super powerful A.I. is already behind us. It’s already in the rearview mirror. We just needed an algorithm that could learn and a network architecture that could somehow encode the knowledge and the capability to reason.
~ Sam Altman
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I don’t think we do a service to anyone to pretend that technology does not eliminate some jobs. Some jobs it just makes much better. But the arc of this has been that every technological revolution eliminates one class, one sets of jobs, and we find new ones on the other side that are hard to imagine from where we sit today.
~ Sam Altman
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