Moore's Law for Everything

Moore's Law for Everything" (March 2021) is Altman's most controversial economic essay — a prediction that AI will collapse the cost of goods and services the same way Moore's Law collapsed the cost of computing. His core argument: AI will make labor cheap and abundant in the same way that technology made capital cheap and abundant. The inevitable outcome, he argues, is that prices fall dramatically for everything that involves cognitive labor — tax preparation, medical diagnosis, legal advice, education, software development. Altman then makes an unusual political pivot: because this deflationary force will also displace workers, he proposes an American Equity Fund that taxes capital and land value and distributes the proceeds as universal basic income. The essay is unusual for a tech CEO because it acknowledges the distributional problem explicitly: AI will make some people much richer unless deliberate redistribution mechanisms are built before the disruption. Critics noted that the 2.5% tax on company equity he proposed would be politically impossible and that UBI doesn't solve skills displacement. But the underlying analysis — that AI is deflationary for labor costs in ways that are difficult to reverse — proved prescient. Reading this alongside The Intelligence Age shows the arc of Altman's thinking: by 2024 he dropped the redistributive framing and focused on the abundance upside, suggesting either growing optimism or growing caution about political controversy.