Getting ahead
of AI's economic disruption

"If the productivity boost from AI is large enough to transform any country’s fiscal arithmetic, vast job disruption is probably coming, meaning more spending on unemployed workers. Income may also shift from labour to capital, which is more lightly taxed."

This week, nearly 200 economists and technology leaders signed a public statement warning that advanced AI could bring serious economic disruption: to jobs, to wages, and to how broadly prosperity is shared. Windfall's Adrian Brown is a signatory…

Do Androids Dream of Electric Stakes? This week's The Economist cover calls on politicians and companies to get ahead of the AI disruption before the politics turn ugly. The same week The New York Times reports on the launch of RAISE US a $500m initiative co-founded by Gina Raimondo to retrain American workers facing displacement. This is the moment for policymakers to step up before technology outruns the institutions meant to govern it, or face a runaway trAIn situation uglier than anything on a magazine cover…

Questions about who benefits from AI-driven prosperity are moving rapidly from academic seminars and think tanks into frontline politics.

South Korea’s Prime Minister, Kim Min-seok, has proposed that AI wealth could ultimately support a form of basic income. Other nations should take note…

The dominant policy question of the next decade may well be:

How can societies maintain economic security, social cohesion and political legitimacy during an extended period of partial automation and uneven disruption driven by advancing AI capabilities?…

Martin Wolf’s column in today’s Financial Times doesn’t pull its punches. He argues: - AI capabilities are advancing rapidly - The economic impacts are uncertain but could be profound in terms of wealth (and power) concentration - If we don’t take proactive steps, democracy itself could be threatened - We need to start taking the concept of radical wealth redistribution seriously and preparing our potential policy responses. He closes by saying “The time to prepare for this is now. If we do not act, it will be far too late.”…

A Brief History of Time and AI: The AI-and-jobs debate keeps splitting into two camps: "This is just the next general-purpose technology" vs "This is the great displacer." In AI Frontiers, Deric Cheng and Jacob Schaal argue the real disagreement isn't either/or — it's about timing…

Forty economists, policymakers and technologists walked into the Peterson Institute for International Economics this week and spend a day working through what an AI-disrupted economy actually looks like…