What is the political risk of extreme wealth concentration from AI?
Co-Founder & CEO at Palantir Technologies
You cannot have a revolution where I become 50 times wealthier and everyone else becomes 10 percent wealthier. That is a mathematically guaranteed path to political insanity. It manifests on the far left as people who say screw this, I am going to blow up the whole system. On the far right it looks different but the anger is the same. And by the way, the far right and far left are not wrong about the underlying reality. They are correctly reading the political landscape. What I disagree with is their proposed solution, which does nothing for poor people and everything to help our adversaries. What we need instead is serious wealth redistribution at the top that does not kill entrepreneurship. A wealth tax is actually not the answer even though it would benefit me financially. You have to find ways to tax at the high end that are tied to reduction of waste, fraud, and abuse. That is a much harder problem.
This answer is part of a full interview with Alex Karp, Co-Founder & CEO at Palantir Technologies.
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