🔮 Exponential View #578: Fable & time to pause AI; iPhone vs babies; gene therapy, bad CEOs & Chinese Gen Z++

Your Sunday briefing

This post originally appeared in Exponential View.

“The core assumption here is that AI will tilt the economy’s income from labor to capital. We don’t have evidence that this is happening yet and we may not know for a long time.”

Hi all,

I sent a note on Thomas Piketty’s blueprint for global justice to members of Exponential View the other day. I call its recommendations a “blueprint for managed decline”. The commentary touches on the future of modernity, scientific dynamism and democratic legitimacy. Read it here.

In this briefing, we look at:

• The iPhone reduced fertility; what will AI do?

• What’s driving the consensus behind pausing AI development?

• The largest solar factory, gene therapy for rejuvenation & Chinese Gen Z finds inspiration in Western memes++

But, first…

How will we distribute AI wealth?

Bernie Sanders, Sam Altman, Donald Trump and Vinod Khosla all agree that the public should own a slice of AI. Bernie proposes transferring 50% of ownership of leading AI companies into a sovereign wealth fund; Trump is supportive; Sam agrees in principle but pushed back on the 50%; and Vinod wrote an op-ed in the FT advocating for a new tax code on wealth AI creates and eventually pooling it into a sovereign wealth fund:

A sovereign fund with ownership of AI companies makes every American a capital owner, not a bystander to the AI economy.