Moore's Law for Everything (March 2021) (moores.samaltman.com)

The essay argues that rapidly improving AI will catalyze a fourth industrial revolution—“Moore’s Law for everything”—where software and robots increasingly replace human labor, driving down the cost of many goods and services and creating enormous new wealth. The author predicts near-term capabilities (AI reading legal documents and giving medical advice within five years) and long-term recursive self‑improvement that accelerates progress. That trajectory matters to the AI/ML community because it implies massive scale-up in deployment, new incentives for research and productization, and urgent social impacts that technical work alone won’t address: falling labor costs, changing job composition, and large shifts in who captures value from AI systems. To manage this transition, the essay proposes shifting taxation from labor to capital and distributing ownership broadly through an “American Equity Fund.” Key mechanics: annually levying 2.5% of public companies’ market value paid in shares and 2.5% of privately held land value paid in dollars, then issuing annual cash and share distributions to adult citizens. Technical and economic implications include aligning incentives between citizens and AI-driven firms (shares rise with national success), avoiding profit-reporting loopholes, and addressing rising costs in housing, healthcare, and education by sharing ownership of wealth-generating assets. The proposal frames policy as essential to ensure inclusive growth—so AI’s productivity gains translate into widespread economic opportunity rather than concentrated capital ownership.