Economic policy for AGI

aalphabetatango about 3 hours ago 41 commentsRead Article on institute.deepmind.com

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SoftTalker•about 1 hour ago

> Yet in the short term, significant transformations have often also produced lower wages for many, hollowed out regional economies, and deepened inequality.

"Short term" being rather loosely used? Most industrial regions have never recovered. Look at Gary Indiana, Detroit and surrounding towns, Toledo, other regions that were dependant on manufacturing or mining. Most have been stagnating for decades; few have found a path back to a thriving economy.

baron816•34 minutes ago

Those places aren’t isolated though. Many of their residents (and especially their children) have left and found opportunities in other parts of the country.

Economists tend to prefer policies that help people, not places. Gary, Indiana just doesn’t have any geographical advantages that make it competitive.

I think, if anything, the mistake was to allow people in those places to believe there would be an eventual turnaround by trying to prop up uncompetitive manufacturing industries.

SoftTalker•25 minutes ago

Gary has a port on Lake Michigan, is right next to Chicago and its rail and transit hubs, is well-connected to the interstate highway system, has an airport... it's hard for me to understand how it doesn't have geographical advantages.

nradov•20 minutes ago

Gary has a huge geographical advantage in being located on the Great Lakes. This really cuts the cost of transport for bulk materials. And it gives them a reliable source of fresh water. It could be a great site for a nuclear power plant. Regardless of how AI economic policy shakes out, we're going to need a lot more electrical power.

oblio•30 minutes ago

Gary, Indiana.

Large parts of Northern England.

Large parts of Scotland.

Walloonia in Belgium.

Northern France.

There are LOTS of regions where the people living there have never recovered after deindustrialization. We cannot expect millions of people to just uproot, it's not realistic.

MattPalmer1086•20 minutes ago

This is true. Pretty much everyone I was friends with at school in the north of england left, most of us now in or around London. But we were the ones who went to university. Most who didn't stayed put.

nradov•37 minutes ago

It's a multifactorial problem. The decline of heavy manufacturing was one cause of economic stagnation in Detroit. But the failed progressive social policies and lack of effective law enforcement didn't help either. Businesses are hesitant to expand in areas where they can't find reliable employees and where their property isn't secure.

jaggederest•about 2 hours ago

My read, but the effective policies are infeasible, and the feasible policies are largely business as usual. Pretty much precisely as expected, honestly. I struggle to see how anything like this is going to be implemented without business as usual changing in ways that the current system is extremely resistant to.

hn_throwaway_99•about 2 hours ago

I thought this was a good read with good data analysis, but at the end of the day none of this matters if the political and democratic systems collapse. If there is broad displacement by AI, I find it really difficult to believe folks will sit down and have a rational discussion about pros and cons of various policies, and it's nearly impossible to predict what will happen. I for one am fairly surprised that what I think is the valid anger among the US working class was successfully channeled into a cult around a grifter and huckster whose vast majority of policies are most detrimental to his biggest supporters.

pixl97•about 2 hours ago

>I for one am fairly surprised that what I think is the valid anger among the US working

While surprising it should be too surprising. 1930-1945 was another example of this happening.

arbirk•about 1 hour ago

Embodied robots is the most significant threat imo. Capital can be taxed but for now we have few general policy frameworks for the "who gets to walk and drive on the street" question

habosa•about 1 hour ago

Scares me. When the ruling class get robots servants they will have no need for even simple human interaction anymore and that will truly unleash them to do harm.

mschuster91•10 minutes ago

> Amid this uncertainty, there are at least a few reasons for hope that society can better manage a disruptive technological shock this time around. In the past, policymakers were limited by weaker and less knowledgeable institutions than we have today. Social science has made strides in understanding how technological shocks unfold and how to measure the impact of new innovations on labor markets. We also know more about the toolkit governments have to implement policies and how to scale them quickly.

We as in "humanity as a whole" might have the knowledge and the tools... but only in theory.

In practice, most Western governments are falling to the far-right / ultra-libertarian populist crowd. They will not apply what should be done (tax the rich profiting off of AI and redistribute that) simply due to it running contrary to their ideology. And on top of that, most Western countries never came off of the debt they took on during 2007ff, instead adding much more debt during and after Covid and now the Russian war against Ukraine, and probably at least some will also finance urgent aids for the people due to the Iran War with debt.

pembrook•31 minutes ago

Man this is really starting to feel like we're in 1999.

I was waiting for 'retail day trader' mania to get even more insane, but since no startup goes public anymore for like a decade, thats probably not going to be the main signal this time.

My pet theory is that doomer psychosis reaching small town USA would actually be the signal for this cycle that things are getting irrational and the bubble is in danger of popping. Which seems like we're getting there re: data center town hall hysteria and viral doomer claims like the recent Anthropic 'whistleblower.'

Further checklist items:

[] Valley nerds huffing their own farts, massively overestimating the speed with which their new tech will penetrate the real economy (classic dotcom-bubble stuff, check)

[] Hot companies of the day publishing straight-faced blog posts like these with absurd claims like 8-20% GDP growth (check)

[] Claims of "massive societal impact" going more viral than bearish AI bubble claims are going viral (this switch just flipped, check)

[] Fed signaling more interest rate rises than originally anticipated (just happened)

Very interested to see how this plays out. I'm sure the changes will all come eventually, but as with the dotcom bubble, it took decades before most people even knew how to use the new tools.

Something tells me the 82% of German firms, who are still using fax machines in 2026, won't be running their businesses via agents any time soon.

312iuz•about 2 hours ago

I'd rather read an analysis from the World's Socialist Website than from the perpetrators.

What are your concrete plans now for the 30,000 Oracle employees that have been fired because Larry got overly ambitious with AI?

jackb4040•about 1 hour ago

Funny how Hyperscalers will write endlessly about this outcome but have no plan for what happens if LLMs turn out to be a bubble and the economy they're propping up goes into recession

AIiscoming•about 1 hour ago

You should want to read both sides and generate your own view of it.

You can't ignore signals of the frontier labs and people working there. How much you trust them and how serious you take them and how much it reflects on what you experience, is your personal analysis.

I'm playing around with fable 5.1 and Astra and its really crrazy how much better they got again now in comparison to a few month, i do trust them to a certain degree, that they are already seeing again progress internally we don't have yet.

The last update killed for sure a lot of low level/avg blender/3d artists.

nradov•28 minutes ago

What were your concrete plans then for the thousands of Oracle employees who were fired in 2005, 2006, 2009, 2017, and 2022 before they got ambitious with AI? Mass layoffs at Oracle are nothing new, they've never hesitated to make huge cuts.

Considering that socialism has been an abject failure every time it's been tried at scale, I fail to see any analysis from the World's Socialist Website could be useful.

harimau777•3 minutes ago

Socialism has been hugely successful. Just look at Western Europe and the Nordic countries. Socialism has only been an abject failure if you swallow the conservative talking point that "socialism" is always equivalent to Stalinism/Maoism.

dyauspitr•about 2 hours ago

Though AGI isn’t here yet (and in my opinion will only be marginally useful until we have physical AGI), we need to speedrun the painful bits so we can get to the other side in one generation. We need to bear the brunt of it and be the sacrificial generation.

cdrnsf•about 2 hours ago

There's no reason we need to and there's every reason to believe that the people and companies foisting this technology on society will accrue the benefits and dump the fallout on everyone else.

ProfessorLayton•about 2 hours ago

>We need to bear the brunt of it and be the sacrificial generation.

Who is "We" here?

I'll take a guess: Gen Z, and Gen A.

Gen Z because they went through covid during college, and now this AI boom that's completely wreaked the entry level job market.

Gen A is looking increasingly grim, unfortunately. If any of you know any school teachers, you'd know how disheartening it is to try and teach someone that has a homework and entertainment machine in their pocket at all times.

Millenials went through everything Gen Z has and more ('08), but there was at least a few years of relative normalcy growing up. I don't know what's next, but I'm not very excited about it.

/rant

breezybottom•about 2 hours ago

As always, named "generations" are completely arbitrary and meaningless. They're made up by marketers to sell products.

foota•about 2 hours ago

A generation is a time that people were born between and useful because it embodies much of the cultural context that people share.

rvz•about 1 hour ago

Correct. It is another way to divide people again, just like people who are pro-AI vs anti-AI.

Do not fall for it.

dyauspitr•about 2 hours ago

Probably late millennials, early gen Z

harimau777•about 2 hours ago

I think that there are a lot of people who would be unwilling to sacrifice their life.

pixl97•about 2 hours ago

Looking back at the beginning of the 1900s and now there are a lot of meta level parallels. Too much change is happening too quickly for societies to realistically adapt. This leaves a lot of room for greedy agents to gather other power seeking agents to further destabilize the situation for their own gain. The outcome of things like this is almost always war. Problem is once war starts it tends to spiral out of control and the body counts increase rapidly.

SoftTalker•36 minutes ago

A real war would disrupt the internet so substantially as to render AI inoperative. Data centers are easy to find on Google Earth, few are really hardened against deliberate attack, and they would be immediate targets.

AIiscoming•about 1 hour ago

I would also add that the internet is very young and the amount of data and news we get daily is also new and different stressful than 50 years ago.

dgellow•about 1 hour ago

There is absolutely no reason to have that being forced at full speed on the entire world without consent, no. That’s a completely insane thing to say

nicebyte•about 2 hours ago

"need to"? why?

tgv•about 1 hour ago

Just another guy who loves humanity, but hates humans.