Sam Altman on the A.I. Revolution, Trillionaires and the Future of Political Power
About this episode
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in a pre-ChatGPT conversation about his essay Moore's Law for Everything, predicts AI will massively increase productivity while concentrating wealth — making governance, not technology, the central challenge. He proposes funding a form of universal basic income through an equity-style tax on capital and land, argues jobs will transform rather than vanish, and discusses OpenAI's shift from nonprofit to capped-profit structure to afford frontier research. They debate AI alignment and safety, the geopolitics of competing with China on AI, and whether trillionaires and political power concentrated in tech labs can coexist with democracy. Altman remains an optimist: abundance is possible, but only with deliberate redistribution and oversight.