Dario Amodei

In the short term, being creative about ways to reassign employees within companies may be a promising way to stave off the need for layoffs.

In the long term, in a world with enormous total wealth, in which many companies increase greatly in value due to increased productivity and capital concentration, it may be feasible to pay human employees even long after they are no longer providing economic value in the traditional sense.

Anthropic is currently considering a range of possible pathways for our own employees that we will share in the near future.

Fourth, wealthy individuals have an obligation to help solve this problem.

It is sad to me that many wealthy individuals, especially in the tech industry, have recently adopted a cynical and nihilistic attitude that philanthropy is inevitably fraudulent or useless.

Both private philanthropy like the Gates Foundation and public programs like PEPFAR have saved tens of millions of lives in the developing world, and helped to create economic opportunity in the developed world.

All of Anthropic's co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of our wealth, and Anthropic staff have individually pledged to donate company shares worth billions at current prices, donations that the company has committed to matching.

Fifth, while all the above private actions can be helpful, ultimately a macroeconomic problem this large will require government intervention.

The natural policy response to an enormous economic pie coupled with high inequality due to a lack of jobs, or poorly paid jobs, for many, is progressive taxation.

The tax could be general or could be targeted against AI companies in particular.

Obviously tax design is complicated, and there are many ways for it to go wrong.

I don't support poorly designed tax policies.

I think the extreme levels of inequality predicted in this essay justify a more robust tax policy on basic moral grounds, but I can also make a pragmatic argument to the world's billionaires that it's in their interest to support a good version of it.

If they don't support a good version, they'll inevitably get a bad version designed by a mob.

Ultimately, I think of all of the above interventions as ways to buy time.

In the end AI will be able to do everything, and we need to grapple with that.

It's my hope that by that time, we can use AI itself to help us restructure markets in ways that work for everyone, and that the interventions above can get us through the transitional period.

Subheading Economic Concentration of Power Separate from the problem of job displacement or economic inequality per se is the problem of economic concentration of power.

Section 1 discussed the risk that humanity gets disempowered by AI, and Section 3 discussed the risk that citizens get disempowered by their governments by force or coercion.

But another kind of disempowerment can occur if there is such a huge concentration of wealth that a small group of people effectively controls government policy with their influence, and ordinary citizens have no influence because they lack economic leverage.