Alex Imas

And unless you can figure out exactly how to get it to them specifically, you have the problem of, can I do, like, can I do a UBI off the money I've saved?

And so then there's a question of like, well, maybe every time, I don't know if this is the case, maybe every time this has happened in history, the technological frontier has expanded a bunch.

And so-

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so this is very helpful.

So there's a...

Many different things have to be true for this scenario to come to pass, each of which seem unlikely.

One, it has to be the case that it is possible to automate entire white-collar jobs, but only in a piecemeal way.

That is to say that you can only automate software engineers, but that same program can't also automate an accountant and an analyst and whatever.

Where I think, at least my model of intelligence is such that

both of the breadth of tasks that it requires to do something like software engineering and what intelligence is, is such that if you can really just lay off all the software engineers, you've got enough in the bucket there that you could automate all kinds of white-collar work.

So yeah, you're saving...

There's huge amounts of potential savings that have happened as a result of these layoffs.

And also that AI is going to be cheaper than human labor.

And if both of those things are true, this messy middle scenario where we literally don't have the wealth to go around seems unlikely.

And the question is, what is the best way to tax it and redistribute it?

You're a normal shareholder.

But this goes back to the question of indexing because if indexing is hard, then universal basic capital is hard.

Like what if Anthropic goes to zero, but some random robotics company takes all the surplus?

One concern with the wealth tax is that, you know, there's no politically sustainable equilibrium at like 0.5% wealth tax.