The economic hazards of AI

NY Times -   Since its early years, OpenAI believed that A.G.I. would transform the global economy and generate untold wealth for its creators. The leadership held that government action would be critical for helping people navigate the disruption that A.I. caused. In a 2021 blog post, the company’s chief executive, Sam Altman, predicted that within decades, “unstoppable” A.I. systems would be able to do almost any job a human could, and thus would shift power from labor to capital. His proposed solution was to aggressively tax assets: land and A.I.-company shares. “If public policy doesn’t adapt accordingly, most people will end up worse off than they are today,” Mr. Altman wrote....

This premonition is not a well-kept secret. It shows up in the Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s public pronouncements about a white-collar blood bath and in the disappearing-message Signal chats in which tech executives boast about the roles they plan to automate. You feel it in the fretting of recent college graduates who apply to hundreds of jobs without landing a single interview. You hear it in the gallows humor of the software engineers who joke about replacing themselves with Claude Code.