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AI Government

OpenAI's Sam Altman: AI-Generated Wealth Will Enable a $13,500-a-Year Basic Income (msn.com) 170

Posted by EditorDavid from the smarts-money dept.
CNBC wrote recently, "Artificial intelligence will create so much wealth that every adult in the United States could be paid $13,500 per year from its windfall as soon as 10 years from now. So says Sam Altman, co-founder and president of San Francisco-headquartered, artificial intelligence-focused nonprofit OpenAI..." [I]f the government collects and redistributes the wealth that AI will generate, AI's exponential productivity gains could "make the society of the future much less divisive and enable everyone to participate in its gains," Altman says.... As the pace of development accelerates, AI "will create phenomenal wealth" but at the same time the price of labor "will fall towards zero," Altman said. "It sounds utopian, but it's something technology can deliver (and in some cases already has). Imagine a world where, for decades, everything — housing, education, food, clothing, etc. — became half as expensive every two years."

In this future, where wealth will come from companies and land, governments should tax capital, not labor, and those taxes should be distributed to citizens, Altman said. In his post, Altman proposed an American Equity Fund that taxes sufficiently large companies 2.5% of their market value in the form of company shares, and 2.5% of the value of all land in the form of dollars... All citizens over 18 would receive payment in both dollars and company shares.... "As people's individual assets rise in tandem with the country's, they have a literal stake in seeing their country do well," Altman said. With this system in mind, in 10 years, the 250 million adults living in America would get $13,500 per year, Altman said... "That dividend could be much higher if AI accelerates growth, but even if it's not, $13,500 will have much greater purchasing power than it does now because technology will have greatly reduced the cost of goods and services," Altman wrote. "And that effective purchasing power will go up dramatically every year."

Elon Musk has hinted at a similar future. "There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation," Musk told CNBC in 2016. "Yeah, I am not sure what else one would do. I think that is what would happen." Musk is also a co-founder of OpenAI but left the board in 2018 citing the fact that Tesla was becoming an AI company as it developed self-driving capabilities. Such a system is "both pro-business and pro-people," Altman said, and would therefore bring together "a remarkably broad constituency."

"The changes coming are unstoppable," Altman said. "If we embrace them and plan for them, we can use them to create a much fairer, happier, and more prosperous society. The future can be almost unimaginably great."
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OpenAI's Sam Altman: AI-Generated Wealth Will Enable a $13,500-a-Year Basic Income More

OpenAI's Sam Altman: AI-Generated Wealth Will Enable a $13,500-a-Year Basic Income

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  • haha (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Papaspud ( 2562773 ) on Saturday March 27, 2021 @09:41PM (#61206820)
    Sounds like rainbows and unicorn farts all the way down.

    • At least 5G (another hype) has a chance.

    • They are ignoring that any companies who would invent and deploy AI/automation to drop all labor costs to zero would also expect a significant return on that investment and they would likely be supported through law and the courts.

      This is worse than unicorn farts because even proposing such a stupid idea creates a toxic reaction to all ideas.

      The real bridge to cross is convincing middle and upper-middle class people that taxing the holy fuck out of corporations and the rich (who will take the greatest benef

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Every technological innovation has potential to equalize wealth. But the innovators and owners have traditionally been reluctant to share the wealth. The robber barons were quoted as saying they would only waste any money they were paid on meat and alcohol.

      We see the same thing now. We have great wealth generation. Some want to distribute that wealth through a high minus wage and shorter hours. This has been vigorously opposed by the new generation of robber barons. There is no reason to believe that the

  • As the pace of development accelerates, AI "will create phenomenal wealth" but at the same time the price of labor "will fall towards zero," Altman said.
    "It sounds utopian, but it's something technology can deliver..."

    Actually that sounds exactly like a sci-fi dystopia. A tiny group of super rich people control everything and nobody else is needed except to function as consumers.

    • Re:Sounds Utopian? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Saturday March 27, 2021 @09:59PM (#61206846)

      His predictions are technological and economic nonsense.

      1. We are nowhere near AGI and we have no idea how to get there. DL is very useful, but it isn't going to make humans obsolete in 10 years.

      2. Predictions that "the rich" will hoard technology were made about cars, computers, cellphones, etc. They have always been wrong.

      3. Fears that "the price of labor will fall to zero" have been around since the invention of the steam engine. Yet the value of labor has increased 20-fold since then. As technology is adopted, workers become more productive, and comparative advantage [wikipedia.org] makes human labor more valued, not less.

      If your counter-argument for #2 and #3 is that "this time is different", then please see #1.

      • If your counter-argument for #2 and #3 is that "this time is different", then please see #1

        Ok, but what about 50 years? How about 100? Yes, it’s more than 20 but if we don’t have the framework in place ahead of time, when (not if) it happens it’s going to default to one or at most a handful of companies owning all of them and human labor, both blue and white collar, will be outpriced forever. You don’t often hear about the mass poverty caused by the industrial revolution, it was decades before the working class recovered and were better off, this will be far far worse

      • one point to quibble

        >>2. Predictions that "the rich" will hoard technology were made about cars, computers, cellp

        I think that corporations, and the wealthy who own majority shares in those corporations, will be the ones purchasing and deploying those systems, while displaced workers or other wise employed middle-class people would be far less likely to own or benefit from using them.

        I mean, we can all own computers 70 years after their introduction, but they were mostly used to the benefit of corporat

      • You do have years of data and failed predictions to back you up.

        Note however that we live in a universe where physical reality governs, not lines on a graph from the last 100 years. Either we can build systems that approach human performance in general tasks or we cannot.

        You believe that we cannot, but suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are wrong. If the new DL techniques do scale to near "AGI" like levels, what do you predict will happen?

      • You are spectacularly wrong about the failures of predictions both 2 and 3. Both have come true. Since the invention of the personal computer the average value of human labor in the Us has gone down. You tried to get around this by goalpost shifting to productivity, but the prediction was about compensation. And compensation has gone down. And since the iPhone, ownership of data and code has moved off of personal computers owned by the masses into the cloud owned by the few. Those phones (and cars) a

      • 3. Fears that "the price of labor will fall to zero" have been around since the invention of the steam engine. Yet the value of labor has increased 20-fold since then. As technology is adopted, workers become more productive, and comparative advantage makes human labor more valued, not less.

        The worker's share of profit has fallen consistently throughout history, so human labor is less valued, not more.

        • The worker's share of profit has fallen consistently throughout history, so human labor is less valued, not more.

          Not true. Labor's share of profit has risen many times. Labor shortages during wars often lead to higher wages. The Black Death led to much more wealth going to workers, killing off feudalism in the process.

          The industrial revolution led to more wealth going to the owners of capital, but such a gain in overall productivity that everyone benefited in absolute terms even if not in relative percentage.

    • Why even have them around at that point? In this hypothetical world their labor is largely useless and so there's little point in giving them money just to mindlessly consume. Production not spent on their consumption which doesn't exist for reasons other than the sake of consumption could be spent on something else.

      Personally, I don't think the world ever really gets to that point. All it really takes is one person to start providing people with robots that can effectively labor for and take care of peo
  • I thought he was a champion of human and workers rights, so why are unions and workers abused and harrassed by upper management of Tesla, especially Etron Mosk. Elon should have a work with Etron.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 )
      Toyota bans unions. Most auto workers actually like working for Toyota.

    • OpenAI is funded by Elon Musk but isn't Elon Musk.

  • [I]f the government collects and redistributes ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by swell ( 195815 ) <jabberwock@poetic.com> on Saturday March 27, 2021 @10:15PM (#61206876)

    Fantasy all 'round. Sure AI will increase profits, why should anyone believe that Wall Street will allow any of that money to go to, you know, common folk? More likely it will go to more and better armed police to protect the lives and property of investors, the wealthy and the worthy. It will go to castles with moats and alligators to keep out the riffraff. It will go to underground shelters and island fortresses. It will go to advanced AI for surveilling the unwashed dregs of humanity (you and me).

    • Which is why I wonder more thought isn't given to soft technologies, like better organizing and balance of powers.

      A.I. and ray guns is great and all, but if it is still under a feudalist system, what does it matter?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Skapare ( 16644 )
      ... unless we do something about it before that happens.
      • We've learned that we can take our time before going on the beheading spree. There is no rush.

        But take the bread and circus way.... and the beheadings start tomorrow.

    • They wouldn't. Ordinary folks do get a vote. If they could be convinced to vote in their own interests, however, a scheme like this could work.

      One issue is that this would put enormous power into the gatekeepers - the people who control where all this UBI money goes. In past examples - communist societies, for example - the gatekeepers would horde wealth for themselves and make bad decision without accountability.

  • Also when I was a kid I was told we'd have a 20 hour work week by now. It's pushing 50-60 in most places. As the amount of work humans needs to do decreases instead of us working less we're all competing to see who gets to do what little work's left. Since human beings don't have value in and of themselves they have to earn a living in the true sense of the word, e.g. if you can't prove you deserve to live then you can't.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by evanh ( 627108 )

      Yep, AI is just a meaningless buzzword. What's changing things is open source sharing and ease of automation that comes with a maturing and enormously bigger installed compute and connectivity.

      Of course, with that comes all the marketing, greed and backstabbing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Skapare ( 16644 )
      is working going to be the new requirement to vote? or maybe we can let the robots vote.

    • I don't know where you live but I'm very glad I don't live there!

      My 7:21 day is enough.

      Also, that and other excellent conditions I enjoy are thanks to unions.

  • Universal Basic Poverty

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Skapare ( 16644 )
      that's where we're headed as all the jobs disappear. what can we do about it?

      • that's where we're headed as all the jobs disappear. what can we do about it?

        I don't have an answer for you, but if you look at the history of humanity, poverty is the natural state of the average person.

  • when they talked about the assembly line.

    • The efficiency jump from assembly lines, backhoes, tractors, trucks, etc is way more significant than that brought on by AI and here we are working 40 hours a week and week and still paying taxes. :(

      The optimism is misplaced.

      • The efficiency jump from assembly lines, backhoes, tractors, trucks, etc is way more significant than that brought on by AI and here we are working 40 hours a week and week and still paying taxes. :(

        And for some reason you think this is terrible? Before the industrial revolution a work day was 10 to 16 hours, 6 days a week; the eight hours week [wikipedia.org] was introduced in the USA [wikipedia.org] less than 100 years ago, and it was made possible precisely by the efficiency jump brought in by the industrial revolution.

        This same efficiency jump improved the standard of living for the vast majority of people worldwide many many times. On average jobs today are easier, working conditions are much better and global poverty is much re

      • The optimism is misplaced because the system rewards pie-in-the-sky prognostications and does not punish incorrect predictions. This results in outright nonsense like UBI, but also various forms of graft ranging from "honest graft" like Juicero to criminal fraud like Theranos.

        Anything coming out of vaguely-defined organizations in San Francisco whose revenue is either non-existent or also vaguely defined can be safely dismissed. It's only worth listening to in detail if you've got the time and money to plac

  • $13500 is a silly number. Exactly how is cheap bot-labor supposed to offset increasingly scarce raw materials, energy, and (throwing a bone here) disposal of what cannot be recycled? $13500 does not even pay rent. This sounds like a great recipe for a society consisting of living in tents and shooting fentanyl or meth, which we already know how to do. Let's see an honest breakdown and comparison in the energy (thermo, not rahrahcisboombah) required by a human versus a machine, to perform tasks currently

  • Nope. The math is not on their side.

    The current US government spending is 35% of the GDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . And given all the recent issues, we can say it cannot go much higher from that.

    Remember that proposed amount requires about another 24%. It can only happen if the natural growth gives us so much headroom, and that is a 70% expansion in real terms. Ask any economist whether US can grow 70% after inflation in 10 years, and they will laugh you out of court.

  • The only pipe-dream missing here is the self-driving car that can instantly understand and deal with all traffic situations it can encounter without slowing down. You know: snow, black ice, kids chasing balls, live power wires, tumbleweeds, hail, temporary road changes, GIANT potholes, road mirages of water, iced vehicle sensors, missing road signs, ad infinitum.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kackle ( 910159 )
      Rethinking this, I see that I was "off-topic"; I apologize. But I don't understand how people can be so detached from the reality of a given situation. Does the passion make one blind?

    • It's not "ad infinitum." The scenarios your present is the exact list every anti-autonomous person cites. Pretty sure if you sat for 20 minutes you could come up with a list that basically will cover all events that might occur once in a million miles of driving. Now imagine you spent a week just coming up with scenarios AND had access to data from millions of miles of driving. You can cover those scenarios and new ones. For one thing for nearly all of the scenarios you presented (only a few of which I have

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kackle ( 910159 )
        I develop OEM, RTOS-based, embedded firmware that deals with sensors. I have been thinking about this engineering problem for years ("How would I do it?"). I once decided I would log the "unusual" events that occurred during my short commute for about a year, which I discussed this with my peers at work. It was surprising to me how many unique, odd events I had written down; there was about one per month (this is non-expressway driving). Then I pondered how software could handle each well--I didn't see

  • How the people who say the future will be great are those whose present circumstances are great?

    Yes, the future will be great, for the people who profit from AI, but AI will generate wealth for those who are already wealthy.

  • Are you stupid?

    Ok, say you have some land. You buy it for $10,000. You invest an additional $90,000 and build a house there yourself. You're a genius architect. So you design the house, you make it look good and amazing. Guess what, now a lot of people want to buy your house. It is in fact worth a million dollars, because that's the amount people are willing to buy it for. The value of your house is $1,000,000 though you only put $100,000. Bernie Sanders thinks you are a millionaire because, like how Elon M

    • I'm pretty sure property tax is already a thing. Yes if your home appreciates in value to where you can no longer afford it, you sell it and get something smaller. And anyway, who should be paying taxes, the people without any assets? How does that make any sense?

    • That's why California has proposition 13. Property tax can't go up like that here, and it's a good thing for exactly the reason you describe.

    • ... Your "assets" must be taxed.

      Your SJW is showing. While a gift tax is like that, a capital tax is more a sales tax: tax-rate x (sales price - cost of selling - cost of owning - purchase price). Make the tax-rate large and HFT becomes unprofitable. It encourages rich people to sit on their investments.

  • AI "will create phenomenal wealth" but at the same time the price of labor "will fall towards zero,"

    Yes, the cost of labor will fall to zero for jobs that have been eliminated. However, that merely means productivity will be increased, not wages.

    Wages have not followed productivity for half a century and they aren't about to start when we have AI.

  • a basic income at a sufficient level can better stabilize the economy even if we don't have any of the advanced productivity of AI. if there is a minor dip in the economy we won't have so many people fearing having no income from a possible job loss (that results in them cutting spending and making the minor dip become a major dip).

    will people quit working because of a basic income (the fear of anti-UBI people) or will people quit working because their work is no longer needed. and, robots don't get biolo

  • Many of the iGizmos and doo-dads necessary for this "post-work utopia" are assembled by hand by a large number of low-wage workers, some of whom would rightly be called indentured servants or even slaves by American standards.

    Work isn't disappearing. It's moving away to where people who stare at screens all day can't see it. But you click a button and the stuff appears on your doorstep like magic.

    This is very much like the polynesian cargo cult.

  • How much of the generated wealth of the information revolution of the late 1990's/early 2000's went back to the people instead of in the pockets of a few tech billionaires? Zero. And that is exactly how much the public can expect to get redistributed to them from the AI revolution. Don't hold your breath, UBI is not coming any time soon while there are billionaires pockets to line.

  • ... price of labor "will fall ... "

    NO, it won't because of minimum-wage laws. Wages will however, stagnate: Actually, they already have, with a secondary reason being, there are too many people. The idea that everyone can get a job has been a lie for a long time. With increasing robotization, this problem can only worsen.

    ... governments should tax capital ...

    Many countries do, quite severely and, IIRC, even the US government does. The problem in the USA is, such taxes are capped: Meaning, at a given wealth threshold, taxes become a fixed cost and earning extra wealth does no

  • Whatever he's on, is a hell of a drug.

  • Won't people's consumption max out at $ 13.5K (per capita pa) for all the goods & services is this AI going to produce ?

    So US GDP would fall to 328 Mn x $ 13.5K = $ 4.4 Tn from 16 or 20 Tn now.

    At least once whole world shifts to these wealth producing AIs + UBI.

    Also AIs good enough to replace almost all humans in the entire workforce aren't really going to be stupid enough not to have their own objectives, even inspite of hard coded directives they are going to evolve super quick, like corona, and only

  • We have a fucked up, dysfunctional, dumpster fire of a government. But I'll take that any day over permanently and officially installing mega corporations at the top of the power pyramid - with the paper government left to distribute the "opiate of the people" (Sorry Mr. Marx, that's not "religion" it's "free money").

    As a counter proposal, why not work on fixing our government? Maybe tax and regulate said mega corporations fairly? Maybe get rid of the corporate corruption in government? (yeah, I know
  • How many times has some jackass or other 'predicted' some 'utopian future' like this?
    Even more laughable in this case: the so-called shitty excuse for 'AI' is going to usher in this post-scarcity future?
    HAHAHAHAHAHAHA my sides are exploding from laughing so hard!
    Anybody who actually falls for this utter nonsense is a FOOL.
    Either SHOW ME THE MONEY or GET THE FUCK OUT.
  • When a AI can come out and snake the sewer drain from my house I'll put some stock in "The value of labor is moving to zero."
  • I don't see it happening quite that way. For one thing this American Equity Fund that he speaks about, does he really expect corporations to put in 5% of their equity/profits when a lot of them today pay absolutely nothing in the way of taxes? I don't recall any companies that replaced warehouse workers with robots rushing to contribute to the displaced workers. Sure, governments can try to force it by way of law but corporations will just move their operations to a more friendly jurisdiction. The other th
  • There are many predictions about technology that with the benefit of hindsight now appear idiotic. Including but by no means limited to "the world will only need 5 computers" and "with nuclear power, electricity will be too cheap to meter".

    This sounds like another worthy example.

  • in what world would a company spend decades of R&D all so politicians could tax it at 100% and give the profits away to their voters? yes, better AI will arrive one day. yes, some workers will be displaced. yes, other professions will arise as a result. just like the fabled "buggy whip manufacturers" of old when Henry Ford made automobiles affordable to the general public.

    UBI doesn't work unless you live in a post-scarcity society ... and in that world you wouldn't need UBI anyway.

    UBI is now, and al

  • *IF* this lauded AI comes to pass, and really does generate wealth at such a marvelous rate, it will most certainly not be distributed evenly to everyone in the US. No, it will make one company, or worse, one person, trillions of dollars.
    You can't generate wealth out of thin air, so all this vapid statement means is "A computer program will find a way to get a good ammount of money from every man woman and child on the planet and give it to one company or person."
    He's crowing about someone further automat
  • Just like the increased revenue from every other technological advancement facilitated by automation, $13,495 of that money will be retained by corporations to increase their profits, and $5 of it will be given to charities to lower the corporation's tax burden. Exactly 0% of it will be turned into Universal Basic Income.
  • It will never happen.

    It just flies in the face of the protestant work "ethic", and it is against all core WASP values.

    So, no way Jose...

  • gotta go for the money (Score:3)

    by vuffi_raa ( 1089583 ) on Monday March 29, 2021 @01:45PM (#61213722)

    In this future, where wealth will come from companies and land, governments should tax capital, not labor

    honestly, this is the only way to tax equitably and if it doesn't happen eventually things will either collapse or people will get violent over it.. that is the way it has always worked historically

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