My work at OpenAI reminds me every day about the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe. 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.
We need to design a system that embraces this technological future and taxes the assets that will make up most of the value in that world–companies and land–in order to fairly distribute some of the coming wealth. Doing so can make the society of the future much less divisive and enable everyone to participate in its gains.
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.”
This technological revolution is unstoppable. And a recursive loop of innovation, as these smart machines themselves help us make smarter machines, will accelerate the revolution’s pace. Three crucial consequences follow:
Because we are at the beginning of this tectonic shift, we have a rare opportunity to pivot toward the future. That pivot can’t simply address current social and political problems; it must be designed for the radically different society of the near future. Policy plans that don’t account for this imminent transformation will fail for the same reason that the organizing principles of pre-agrarian or feudal societies would fail today.
What follows is a description of what’s coming and a plan for how to navigate this new landscape.
On a zoomed-out time scale, technological progress follows an exponential curve. Compare how the world looked 15 years ago (no smartphones, really), 150 years ago (no combustion engine, no home electricity), 1,500 years ago (no industrial machines), and 15,000 years ago (no agriculture).
The coming change will center around the most impressive of our capabilities: the phenomenal ability to think, create, understand, and reason. 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, if we as a society manage it responsibly.
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.
Broadly speaking, there are two paths to affording a good life: an individual acquires more money (which makes that person wealthier), or prices fall (which makes everyone wealthier). Wealth is buying power: how much we can get with the resources we have.
The best way to increase societal wealth is to decrease the cost of goods, from food to video games. Technology will rapidly drive that decline in many categories. Consider the example of semiconductors and Moore’s Law: for decades, chips became twice as powerful for the same price about every two years.
In the last couple of decades, costs in the US for TVs, computers, and entertainment have dropped. But other costs have risen significantly, most notably those for housing, healthcare, and higher education. Redistribution of wealth alone won’t work if these costs continue to soar.
AI will lower the cost of goods and services, 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 mined and refined onsite, using solar power, the cost of building that house is close to the cost to rent the robots. And if those robots are made by other robots, the cost to rent them will be much less than it was when humans made them.
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.
“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). Imagine a world where, for decades, everything–housing, education, food, clothing, etc.–became half as expensive every two years.