How to Rebuild the Social Contract After AGI (with Deric Cheng)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
it is very clear that the major AI companies have all expressed that their focus is to move towards full automation, that they are building tools and that they have the express interest in developing these tools to the degree that they can fully replace human workers.
What is the significance of AGI in reshaping the social contract?
What would be really concerning is the development of, say, superstar firms is a way to call them in which those firms have maybe 100 people or 500 people, but are augmented and supported by thousands of AI agents that allow them to function as much larger and much scalable corporations and eventually start to capture, say, a majority of the economic wealth. What does it look like if the richest person in the world has a wealth of the same GDP as all of Africa, for example? We have seen significant periods of instability, unrest, even revolution when inequality and when the gains from the economy are not well distributed enough.
How does automation contribute to power and inequality?
And we might see similar outcomes if we see that the wealth gets overly concentrated within a small set of people.
Derek, welcome to the Future of Life Institute podcast.
Thanks for having me. All right. Do you want to introduce yourself? Sure. I'm Derek. I'm the director of the Windfall Trust, which is a new nonprofit focused on responding to AI economic disruption from transformative AI scenarios. And I also run a consortium of experts looking to what a new social contract might look like after AGI enters society. And we're calling that the AGI social contract. We've been publishing essays on a regular basis about these topics and trying to explore how to reshape the social contract, how to reshape governments and society in a way that benefits society as a whole.
Yeah, and this is actually what I'm planning for us to talk about in this conversation. Sort of what does it mean to build a social contract after we have AGI or after AGI is widespread in society? So let's start there with what is the actual problem here? How do you see the world evolving over the next decade, say?
What are the potential future scenarios for work in an AI-driven economy?
Yeah, I see that we are on a trajectory where corporations are going to be gaining more and more power overall. I think that as we've all seen, there are maybe four to six tech giants that will be leading the wave of developing frontier AI and that it takes a significant amount of capital and investment in order to build these frontier AI systems. I believe that as the value of these frontier AI systems starts to transition and diffuse into the rest of the economy, we're probably going to see a lot of big players in specific industries, say, for example, Waymo with transportation or consolidation of healthcare companies. And what that really looks like is that you might see maybe three or four major companies, or maybe even just one or two in each industry dominating industries that used to be employing millions of people, right?
So if you have Waymo and maybe two or three other competitors, these might eventually replace a lot of millions of human drivers, for example, over the course of a decade or so.
Which job types are likely to resist AI automation?
And so the real concern that we have at the AGI social contract is really about disempowerment of human labor. We're really worried that if we lose labor's ability to have leverage in the marketplace, we lose their ability to advocate for stronger wages, to have a say in the direction of our economy, then we lose a lot of beneficial aspects of how our society is currently set up. in terms of maintaining agency, maintaining bargaining power for humans, and then in the long term, in the grand scheme of things, really trying to improve human economic outcomes, right? So we're hoping that the strategies that we take in the next decade or so work towards empowering humans and empowering particularly human labor to still be relevant when a lot of value starts shifting from labor to capital.
Yeah. And this shift in power from labor to capital, this is something you might expect if it turns out that AI actually replaces jobs or automates certain industries. Why should we expect that as opposed to AI being tools for workers, which makes them more productive, such that they might have even more bargaining power, which is what we've seen, at least in some industries in the past?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:15
2
What is the significance of AGI in reshaping the social contract?
0:15–0:53
3
How does automation contribute to power and inequality?
0:53–2:10
4
What are the potential future scenarios for work in an AI-driven economy?
2:10–3:16
5
Which job types are likely to resist AI automation?
3:16–4:38
6
How do luxury, land, and inequality intersect in the context of AGI?
4:38–5:23
7
What innovative solutions can be designed for an AI economy?
5:23–6:15
8
How should taxation evolve in response to an AI-driven economy?
6:15–1:04:38
Speakers
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