Deric Cheng

They might have access to programmers or to doctors or tools of that nature much more rapidly than they would have otherwise.

in a paradigm without AI.

I think that the main concerns around developing countries in particular is the risk of them being cut out of the AI boom.

They don't necessarily have a lot of strong tools

across most developing countries to be directly involved in the systems that are developing, creating, and capturing gains from AI.

The data centers, the systems of power, the researchers, all of that is really concentrated in Western countries and China.

And so we're really looking for ways to try to make sure that the trickle-down effects of AI do get widely spread and

And the real concern, if they don't get widely spread, has to do with societal unrest.

I think that we have seen significant periods of instability, unrest, even revolution, when inequality and when the gains from the economy

are not well distributed enough and that we might see similar outcomes when it comes to destabilizing political power, destabilizing democracies, political instability, if we see that the wealth gets overly concentrated within a small set of people.

Definitely.

There are a lot of challenges that will come with AI capabilities taking off very, very rapidly.

The one that I think I'm most focused on is really how quickly can society respond and how quickly can we make the right changes to our political systems, to our societal systems, to our economy in order to adapt.

And really, my belief is that

These are problems of our own volition, not necessarily problems that come from AI.

We could decide today if we all agreed on a certain path to reshape taxation, to reshape welfare systems in order to protect people from the negative outcomes of AI.

It's simply that we don't have the political power or the direction or energy yet behind those types of things or the awareness that this needs to happen.

And so my belief is really that in the case that we see sudden dramatic changes from AI, say something on the equivalent scope of a COVID pandemic or one of the major paradigm shifting moments from the past few hundred years, say the advent of the bread and wood system after World War II,

When you see significant changes in society, you also see a very rapid shift in how governments, societies, and political systems respond.

And so there is a possibility if a lot of things change very rapidly that we might collectively simply decide to move in the right direction.