Sam Altman Reveals Life in 2030

In 2021, Sam Altman released a blog post titled Moore's Law for Everything. This is a blog post that is on the future of the economy and how AI is going to be integrated into the workforce and how it actually shapes different policy. This is something that I think you all should read, but I'm going to be breaking down all of the key points from this article blog post and telling you guys some of the key things that are becoming clearer every single day. The article starts by stating Moore's Law for Everything. His first sentence is one of the ones that I' continue to echo to my post AGI economics community because I want people to understand that look, change is going to come and there's no point pretending that it isn't. So the first sentence is he states that my work at OpenAI reminds me every day about the magnitude of socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people currently believe. And that statement isn't ushered by some random blogger. This is by someone who works at the frontier leading AI research company that exists today. Now this was stated in 2021, so I can't imagine the kind of things that Sam Altman is thinking about the future of the economy. And that statement is one that you should most certainly remember. But let's take a look at some of the things that this actually speaks about. So he says software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people do now. I'm going to say that again guys. Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people do now. Even more power will shift from labor to capital. And this sentence basically means that look, the value on human labor is going to go down while the value on capital is going to go up. And then he also says this, which I've highlighted right here. He says that if public policy doesn't adapt accordingly, most people will end up worse off than they are today. Now that's a statement that I think is one that you should also once again remember. Because basically what he's stating there is that if governments aren't proactive in making policies that take into account the fact that AI is going to increasingly become more and more capable, is going to increasingly do more and more tasks, then we're going to be in a situation where the average person is going to be worse off than they are today. This is something that I tell my community all the time. It's great to of course have governments that enact policies that help you out, but sometimes governments are slow to enact policies. And we can't always rely on the government to have our best interests. I like to think of it like this. The government is probably going to do the bare minimum to ensure, of course, there is an outrage, but other than that, they're not really going to do that much. And that's the problem. If public policy doesn't adapt, most people are going to be worse off than they are today. The article continues to state that in the next five years, computer programs that can think will read legal documents and give medical advice. In the next decade, they will do assembly line work and maybe even become companions. And in the decades after that, they will do almost everything, including making new scientific discoveries that will expand our concept of everything. There are three important predictions for the next years. We've got the first phase, which is, of course, AIs that can think and that can read legal documents and that can give medical advice. And what's interesting is, if you remember, this was, of course, all in 2021. So we can see that from 2021 to 2024, that prediction was arguably spot on. Right now, AI can read legal documents and it can give medical advice. If you've seen the research surrounding this, you'll know that it is no joke. And if we take a look and once again, listen to what Sam Altman is stating here, he says that in the next decade, they will do assembly line work and maybe even become companion. And after that, they're going to be doing almost everything, including making new scientific discoveries that will expand our concept of everything. That puts us on a very fascinating timeline for how the future is going to develop. And the most basic thing that you can see here is that over time, AI becomes more capable and it can do more things that we can do. Now, there are three points that he makes here that I think are just completely fascinating. He says that this revolution will create phenomenal wealth. Okay? Phenomenal wealth. That is a crazy statement. Okay? And of course, as is every technological revolution, there are people who get rich and there are people who are displaced. You always want to be someone who is in the area where you manage to benefit from the transformation the most. This is why I created my community. And he says here that the price of many kinds of labor, which drives the cost of goods and services, will fall towards zero once sufficiently powerful AI joins the workforce. Then he said here that the price of many kinds of labor, which actually drives the cost of goods and services. And this is how economics work. Of course, if it takes, like, someone really smart to create something if you're going to hire them, you have to pay them a higher salary. And of course, because of that, the product has to be more expensive. Basic economics. And he's basically saying here that this is actually going to fall towards zero once sufficiently powerful AI joins the workforce. And he's put joins the workforce here in quotes, because this could mean, of course, a variety of different things. Of course you've got AI joining the workforce in the sense that it's going to be autonomously doing tasks on a computer. And of course you've got AI joining the workforce as a humanoid robot that's able to do many different things. Now, also he's stating here, the second point which most people just aren't paying attention to, is that the world will change so rapidly and drastically that an equally drastic change in policy will be needed to distribute this wealth and enable more people to pursue the life they want. Let's read that one more time. The world will change so rapidly and drastically. So that's two things here, not just the speed, but also how the world actually functions, that a drastic change in policy will be needed to actually distribute the money that basically is being absorbed by these companies that make these AI tools to enable more people to pursue their life they want. You have to understand, we're basically going to be in a society where there are only going to be a few companies that, that managed to capture all of the economic value from AI. And then of course, he comes onto point number three, that if we get both of these right, we can improve the standard of living for more people than we ever have before. And I think this is a true statement. If you manage to drop the price of everything that's valuable towards zero once AI joins the workforce, of course, if you manage to actually distribute, and of course, if you manage to distribute the wealth effectively, this is going to be a society that's currently better off today. But of course, as he said before, this is something that we will need to address in terms of politics. Certain policies will have to change and be enacted in order to make sure that this transition is as smooth as possible. Now, essentially, he said here that because we are at the beginning of this tectonic shift, we have a rare opportunity to pivot towards the future. That pivot can't simply address current societal and political problems. It must be designed for the radically different society of the near future. Remember, he's basically saying here that, look, whilst, yes, developing policies about today's issues are good, but we need to be thinking about the near future and how radically different that economic system is going to be. He says that policy plans that don't account for this imminent transformation. Notice the word imminent there, which basically means it's around the corner. He says that they're going to fail. And when you think about it, it's for the same reason that the organizing principles of a pre agrarian or feudal societies would fail today. Now, he says what follows is a description of what's coming and a plan for how to navigate this new landscape. Here's where he dives into exactly what is coming and how best to prepare. So he says that this is basically part one, the AI revolution. And this is where he says, compare how the world looked 15 years ago. Think about it. There were no real smartphones, and 150 years ago, there were no combustion engines, no home electricity. And 1500 years ago, there were no industrial machines, and, and 15,000 years ago, there were no agriculture. We have exponential growth in terms of the human timeline. And if we just look back 15 years ago, the world does look remarkably different. You have to think, looking towards the future, can you imagine 10, 20 years from now what the world could look like? He says here that the coming change will center around the most impressive of our capability, the phenomenal ability to think, create, understand, and reason. And to the three great technological revolutions, the agricultural, the industrial, and the computational, we will add a fourth, the AI revolution. This revolution will generate enough wealth for everyone to have what they need. And he puts here, if we as a society manage it responsibly, that is a big if, if you will. Now, he says that the technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than we've all made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel. And we've already built AI systems that can learn and do useful things. And they are still primitive, but the trend lines are clear. And I think that's one thing that most people don't understand about current AI paradigms is these people that are at these frontier labs, There's a clear trend line that they are following in terms of these scaling laws, in terms of just looking at how many breakthroughs are made every single year, the kind of research that's being published every single day, and all of the areas that are needed in order to push these systems forward in terms of their ability to reason. And so basically we're seeing here is that there is so much change coming that most people don't even realize about. Now, here's where he talks about the fact that the economy kind of inverted it kind of went worse in the sense that in the last couple of decades, costs in the United States for TVs, computers and entertainment have actually dropped. But other important costs have actually risen significantly. Most notably those for housing, healthcare and higher education. Of course, housing is so expensive. You remember in the 1950s, you could work one job and buy a house and look after your family. Healthcare is ridiculously expensive. Higher education is just so expensive. I remember when it used to less than it is now. And of course, redistribution of wealth alone won't work if these costs continue to soar. I mean, the living conditions now, whilst, yes, they are much better than someone living 150 years ago, doesn't help if you know the costs for housing, healthcare and higher education have risen tremendously. He said that of course AI will lower the cost of goods and services because labor, because labor is the driving cost at many levels of the supply chain. If robots can build a house on land you already own from natural resources and mined and refined on site using solar power, the cost of building the house is close to the cost to rent the robot. And if those robots are made by other robots, the cost to rent them will be much less than if it was when humans made. Similarly, we can imagine AI doctors that can diagnose health problems better than any human, and AI teachers that can diagnose and explain exactly what a student doesn't understand. Now, this is basically where he titles the article Moore's Law for Everything. He said Moore's Law for Everything should be the rallying cry of a generation whose members can't afford anything they want. It sounds utopian, but it's something that technology can deliver and in some cases already has. Imagine a world where for decades everything such as housing, education, foods and clothing become half as expensive every two years. This is basically true for technology. You can buy a phone now that has a really nice camera. You can buy a TV that has huge pixel density and quality and all the things that you might want. This is not the truth. For housing and many of the other things that are important. The one thing that he says here that I somewhat agree with is that of course will discover new jobs. We always do. After a technological revolution and because of the abundance on the other side, we're going to have incredible freedom to be creative about what they are. Now, essentially, this is where he actually talks about the new economic model. And this is where he talks about something called the American Equity Fund. And the American Equity Fund would be capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation. 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares transferred to the fund and by taxing 2.5% of the value of all privately held land payable in dollars. So basically you know how most people think that UBI is the very best solution to AI. And I know that ubi, whilst yes, it is good and it does kind of work in the sense that it's good to help people who are below the poverty line, the fact of the matter is that there are still certain elements of UBI that it still needs. But I do think that the American Equity Fund is something that offers a solution that is quite similar to that because it does offer some incentives. He says that all citizens over would get an annual distribution in dollars and company shares into their account. People would be entrusted to use the money however they needed or for better education. And basically he describes how this would work and why this is pretty much better than ubi. So he says that under the above set of assumptions, this is of course the first example, a decade from now, each of the 250 million adults in America would get about $13,500 every single year. And 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 the technology will have greatly reduced the costs of goods and services and that effective purchasing power will go up dramatically every single year. Basically saying that, look, your life is going to be a lot better. And I guess that is kind of true. If we take a look at the fact that now we can access intelligence for quite cheap. I mean, if you think about it, what we can really do with technology, I guess I could access a business consultant for $20 a month. And if you're unsure what I'm referring to, I'm referring to the fact that GPT4, Gemini Pro, all of the current Frontier Labs, you can access those models for literally just $20 a month. Not to mention that you could get the new state of the art models, llama 3 for just free. Now basically he says here, and he explains the incentives that as long as the country keeps doing better, every citizen would get more money from the fund every year. And every citizen would therefore increasingly partake of the freedoms, powers, autonomies and opportunities that come with economic self determination. Poverty would be greatly reduced and many more people would have a shot at the life that they do want. Now here's where of course he talks about the tax. He says the tax payable in company shares will align the incentives between the companies, investors and citizens, whereas a tax on profits does not. Incentives are superpowers. And this is a critical difference, of course, because he speaks about here that profits can be disguised or deferred or offshored and are often disconnected from share price. But everyone who owns a share in Amazon wants the share price to rise. So essentially this is where they're basically just saying that, of course, as individual assets tend to rise in tandem with the countries, they literally have a stake in seeing their country do well. So basically everyone's incentives aligned. And this is something that I think is quite true, because one of the things we've seen time and time again from companies like Apple, Microsoft and many others is the fact that they will always just avoid paying tax where they can. So they will always literally, you know, just go through Ireland, go through this country, go through that country. They will do that as many times as they can in order to just reduce their tax bill. But of course, increasing their share price is not something that they're going to want to not do. Now, of course, this is basically where Sam Altman talks about the new social contract. So he says that if everyone owns a slice of American value creation, everyone will want America to do better. Collective equity in innovation and in the success of the country will align our incentives. The new social contract will be a floor for everyone in exchange for a ceiling for no one and a shared belief that the technology can and must deliver a virtuous societal and a shared belief that technology can and must deliver a virtuous circle of societal wealth. So it's going to be an interesting new social contract, because I do wonder how this floor will work. I do wonder how, you know, certain economic paradigms are going to be, you know, if there's going to be inflation, is there going to be deflation because the cost of goods is going to drop down? I mean, there's so many different things to think about here. And of course, some of this is quicker, some of this is later than we think. And of course, he says here that we will continue to need strong leadership from our government to make sure that the desire for stock prices to go up remains balanced with protecting the environment, of course, human rights and stuff like that. So here's where we get into part five. Shifting to the new system, of course, is basically where he's stating that, look, everything necessary will be cheap and everyone will have enough money to be able to afford it. As this system will be enormously popular, policymakers who embrace it early will be rewarded and they themselves will then become enormously popular. He actually also talks about the Great Depression. And he speaks about how in the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt was able to enact a huge social safety net that no one would have thought possible five years earlier. And we're, of course, now in a similar movement. And he says here that we are in a similar moment now. So a movement that is both pro business and pro people will unite a remarkably broad constituent. Now, what he actually talks about here, and I think this is rather interesting because I don't think it's going to take that long for this to be implemented. If it is, he says, a politically feasible way to launch the American Equity Fund and one that would reduce the transitional shock. And this is something that I spoke about in my community. You know, I spoke about how the fact that, you know, these AI updates, it's like a shock to someone, you know, if, like, boom, like if you lose your job, that's like a shock, you know, if a new AI comes and, you know, industry, it can just do, you know, a million better things than you. That is, of course, going to be a transitional shock to, you know, society because there's going to be a large percentage of people that are in that category. He's basically stating that the legislation that transitions us gradually to the 2.5% rate and the full 2.5% rate would only take hold once the GDP increases by 50% from the time that law is passed. Starting with small distributions soon will be both motivating and helpful in getting people comfortable with a new future. Achieving 50% GDP sounds like it would take a long time, but it took 13 years for the economy to grow 50% to its 2019 level. But once AI starts to arrive, growth will be extremely rapid and down the line. We will probably be able to reduce a lot of other taxes as we tax these two fundamental asset classes. And he says that the coming changes are unstoppable. If we embrace them and plan for them, we can use them to create a much fairer, happier and much more prosperous society. The future can be almost unimaginably great. Now, I left you guys with that last statement there because I do think that it encapsulates the kind of paradigm shift that we're going to be going into. And yeah, the coming changes are unstoppable. And of course, if we do embrace them, you know, we can create an incredible society. But I think the main problem here is that our leaders going to do the work required to ensure that this transition is one that is fair and is one that, you know, provides for everyone. That is going to be something that is a harder question. And I haven't really heard anyone talk about anything like this, apart from Andrew Yang who has discussed ubi. But I mean, you know, it's going to be interesting to see how many of the different states vote on certain policies if some are just going to be trialed in certain states, if some are just going to be trialed in certain areas of the West. I mean, there's so much to discuss here. But I do think that once there is the transformative AI technology that is there, then people will start to raise questions. And I don't think these policymakers are going to avoid this conversation anymore because it is something that will need to be addressed at some time. Politicians do have this thing where they always just kick the can down the line, but this is not something that you can continually kick the can down the line because at some point that can is going to become full of metal and you're not going to be able to kick it I recently created this tool which is the AI Job Impact Tracker. It has jobs by their industry, by their susceptibility to AI, and all of the new AI tools that are basically impacting their work and of course the future projections on how that role may change. I've left a link to every single tool that there is and I've included some notes on how that tool actually impacts that industry. There are over 200 different that are in this current database. This is just an Excel sheet and if you want access to this Excel sheet, do not forget to click the link in the description and join my post AGI Preparedness community where you can thrive in the post AGI community by preparing now and staying ahead of everyone. If you did enjoy this video, let me know what you think about this new economic model. Do you think Sam Altman has it right with the American Equity Fund or do you think he is misguided in his efforts? I definitely think that out of all the solutions I have heard, it does sound like one that is more promising and more realistic. But I'd love to know your thoughts in the comment section below and hopefully you have an amazing day.