Max wealth

From Hamilton Nolan: why not cap the amount of wealth someone can accrue?

Despite the fact that Mark Zuckerberg has a net worth of more than $200 billion, far more than his descendants could ever spend in several generations, he continues to make his primary product worse because it will make him more money. This, though we do not always think of it this way, is the consequence of having no limit to the accumulation of wealth.

So given that we've all decided that we don't want to spend the net output of humanity on making a set of 9 guys unfathomably powerful, how should we reorient our priorities?

Such a limit on net worth would eliminate the incentive of every single tech CEO, already rich, to get richer. By default, the AI industry would need another goal. The question guiding the evolution of the technology could be, “How do we use this powerful technology to make lives better?” The new drugs it discovered would be distributed with an eye towards the public good rather than towards the infinite generation of profits. The drudge work that it automates could be paid back to the public in the form of shorter hours for the same pay, rather than having those gains taken by CEOs and investors, while workers were stuck with fewer jobs. And on, and on.

Hamilton Nolan, via Tom MacWright