Sam Altman

This does imply some innovation is needed in how taxation happens. That is also something Sam Altman agreed with in his piece. This is an easy and simple problem to solve and all the leadership at that level has agreed on the spirit of the query as far as I've seen in their commentaries. I highly recommend it if you haven't read it yet, it's really good:

https://moores.samaltman.com/

I think once tens of millions of jobs are going away and everyone needs to retrain into the types of work that are still available, we'll pretty seamlessly be able to transition into a UBI model where everyone affected becomes a college student or learns a trade or craft again, with UBI making it a graceful and exciting Great Reset without anyone falling by the wayside. Because at that point, the real economic efficiency gains still exist except at a marginal cost of effectively 0. This means that with automation you can just print what you need and everyone's standard of living skyrockets.

This is because commodities are plentiful on a big planet like this one and others.

I think the "BS jobs" concept is missing the mark a little. Those aren't BS jobs. They're just the jobs that have been most visibly automated the fastest. They may still retain, say, 25% of the useful and necessary functions that those roles require. But because of how culture and legislation lag behind technology in rate of adoption, people still feel the need to put up with appearances of working a specific amount of…

I genuinely believe Worldcoin/World ID is terrible for optics and is not something Sam should have put his name on.

That being said, here's my strongman argument: Sam is scared of the ramifications of AI, especially financially. He's experimenting with a lot of things, such as Basic Income (https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/basic-income), rethinking capitalism (https://moores.samaltman.com/) and Worldcoin.

He's also likely worried about what happens if you can't tell who is human and who isn't. We will certainly need a system at some point for verifying humanity.

Worldcoin doesn't store iris information; it just stores a hash for verification. It's an attempt to make sure everyone gets one, and to keep things fair and more evenly distributed.

(Will it work? I don't think so. But to call it an eyeball identity scam and dismiss Sam out of hand is wrong)

We need to stop using AI as an umbrella term. It’s worth remembering that LLMs can’t play chess and that the best chess models like Leela Chess Zero use deep neutral networks.

Generative AI - which the world now believes is AI, is not the same as predictive / analytical AI.

It’s fairly easy to demonstrate this by getting ChatGPT to generate a new relatively complex spreadsheet then asking it to analyze and make changes to the same spreadsheet.

The problem we have now is uninformed people believing AI is the answer to everything… if not today then in the near future. Which makes it more of a religion than a technology.

Which may be the whole goal …

> Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.

— Sam Altman - https://blog.samaltman.com/successful-people

I think that is a terrible idea because it does nothing to address the real problem - economic growth being largely captured by ultra rich people. Sure everyone who is invested in stock market will be richer, but people who need most help are not buying stocks.

Taxation is hard, so far Sam Altman's capital tax is least worst option I've heard: https://moores.samaltman.com/ . It does have it's deficiencies... It's wealth redistribution, it might slow down or even completely stunt economic growth, and given current political climate and corruption and is highly unlikely to be implemented. At the same time humanitarian value alone it would bring is so astronomical that I believe we must try it. It would also greatly expand middle class which should boost the economy long term.

Things will be shaken up, the way they were when the steam engine was invented. But there's no reason to believe we're headed for a dystopic future.

The result of this development and the underlying trend is vastly increased wealth creation. That's a good thing. You'd have to be a luddite to think otherwise.

Read e.g. https://moores.samaltman.com/, where Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) suggests a scheme for wealth taxation that gives everyone direct ownership of the AI-created wealth and the machinery to make it.

I'm pretty confident that there would be strong democratic support for a scheme along these lines, given how few are able to participate in the highest echelons of the wealth creation in the kind of AI-driven society that will happen before AI becomes truly autonomous.

I'm not entirely convinced narcissism is something that has to be fixed.

There are some aspects to it that are of course destructive as you mentioned (not enjoying listening to other people, and taking things to personally). Fixing these things I think comes down to enjoying the people you spend time with, and a radical belief that things will work out no matter what happens.

But there are other aspects of narcissism that really lend themselves well to success. Overconfidence/inflated egos are some of the only ways that you can take on really big challenges ahead of you. (See Sam Altman's blog post on this - https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful, and PG's tweet - https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1217724728644861953)

I'd love to hear what other people think :)