Deric Cheng
Director of Research @ Windfall Trust
I'm an AI policy researcher serving as the Director of Research for the Windfall Trust, a non-profit focused on ensuring that the economic benefits of advanced AI are shared by everyone.
I also lead the AGI Social Contract, a consortium of experts proposing concrete strategies to design a new social contract for a post-AGI society.
My current priority is to drastically increase the number of researchers investigating strategies to navigate the upcoming AI economic transformation.
I was formerly the AI Governance Lead for Convergence Analysis. At Convergence, I hosted a conference on AI economic impacts and have been guiding thirty fellows conducting economic policy research. Before my focus on AI economics, I conducted research on foundational AI governance policies (e.g. chip registries & model registries) & soft nationalization.
Previously, I was the fifth software engineer and the lead of various projects at Alchemy, an Ethereum infra startup now valued at $10.2 billion. At Alchemy, I created web3.university, a learning platform with over 200k students.
From 2015 - 2018, I was a rapid prototyping researcher at Google's Interaction Lab, where I led software & UX explorations for a next-gen Google Glass. Projects I prototyped include the augmented memory and translation features for the Android XR Glasses.
Unlike the smartphone or the internet, the tools to distribute AI technology already exist - a new version of ChatGPT can be instantly accessed by all individuals with internet access today.
As a result, I'm of the opinion that cognitive labor automation (e.g. anything that a "remote worker" can do) will see diffusion on the order of years, not decades.
Certainly robotics and manual labor diffusion could take decades because it will take a long time for the marginal cost of a robot to fall below that of a person in a developing country.
Zero disagreements to this comment here! The idea of an economic social contract is orders of magnitude more complicated (and yes, ugly and violent) than what I'm describing here. There have definitely been many eras of massive inequality and feudalism / lack of power which complicate this narrative.
I can't claim to be an expert on these topics, or to do them justice in a post like this! And perhaps in future writing of this style I can gesture to or mention the complicated nature of the historical parallels rather than leaving them without context.
I'd agree - for many of these individual policy levers (esp. the monitoring & oversight mechanisms), "soft nationalization" wouldn't be the best term to describe them!
Part of our linguistic struggle here is that we're attempting to map the entire spectrum of gov. involvement and slap an overarching label on it. "Soft nationalization" gets the general point across, but definitely breaks down on a case-by-case basis.