Deric Cheng

has been touched on by a few different economists and thinkers in this space, but it's just certainly not very politically palatable and frankly quite infeasible to implement as AI diffuses quite naturally into almost every layer of our society.

But that...

It's really just a matter of where are we societally to be able to talk about some of these solutions.

And I see that there is significant amounts of work by very, very qualified and thoughtful workers say, give directly on the ideas of UBI.

or the economic security project on the ideas of a universal guarantee and that the best thing that can be done is to continue to give more feel to the fire for those sorts of projects that are really starting to think about how society should look in a decade or two if we see a significant amount of inequality and power concentration among a small set of capital actors.

Yeah, I think that we have the tools that we need to be able to conceptualize and to understand to some degree the solutions in the future.

Certainly to be able to test them, that's a totally different story.

Testing economic beliefs or concepts is traditionally among the hardest things that you could possibly imagine.

And as a result, makes it a relatively softer science because you can't run randomized control trials anymore.

I would say the main aspect that I have not put significant thought towards, but that other people in the AI policy space have put significant thought towards is the idea of loss of control over to AI driven or like economies and political systems owned or controlled by AI systems.

And frankly, that is for me very hard to conceptualize and I'm not quite there yet myself.

So I think there are good resources out there in terms of people who are starting to think in that direction.

Yeah, structurally, we just have a lot of impediments to be able to run fully randomized control trials on a lot of the ideas of policies that we want to notwithstanding the largest one is probably political support and capital.

Economic trials cost millions and millions of dollars.

They require buy-in from governments.

They require significant changes to the lifestyles of many, many, many people.

And they are confounded because people do not operate or live within a vacuum.

They operate individually.

in direct contact and the context of many people who are perhaps not involved with trials.

And so actually one of the most impactful ones that I've read recently is Control Trial by GiveDirectly.