We are continuing our investigation into the implications of the Economic Singularity, the time when we need a new economic system because full automation by AI means people can no longer obtain the resources they need by doing jobs.

Our guest today is Oliver Ritchie, the UK Policy Lead at the Future of Life Institute. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, and a Research Scholar at GovAI. He also spent over six years in policy formation at the Treasury, which is where many of the brightest minds in UK public sector work, and where the really big decisions are made, because the Treasury hold the purse strings.

We wanted to have Oliver on the show because he has written two thought-provoking articles on the Economic Singularity, a paper called “The Fiscal Challenge of Advanced AI”, and a Substack post which summarises it, called “Can we afford to support workers whose jobs are displaced by AI?” 

Selected follow-ups:

• "Oliver Ritchie" - Future of Life Institute
• "Return on Intelligence" - Oliver's Substack
• "Can we afford to support workers whose jobs are displaced by AI?"  - Substack article by Oliver
• "The Fiscal Challenge Of Advanced AI" (PDF) - article by Oliver
• "The case for G20 coordination on wealth taxes" - article by Liam Byrne
• "US super-rich 'pay almost no income tax'" - BBC
• "Trump to meet AI leaders to discuss US investment in their companies" - BBC
• "Getting Ahead of AI's Economic Disruption" - Windfall Trust
• "AI’s Role in Reshaping Power Distribution" - Future of Life Institute project
• "Can you safely build something that may kill you?" (about Sam Altman) - by Kelsey Piper
• "Exploring Machine Consciousness" - Prism / Conscium podcast, cohost Calum Chace
• "The biggest blockages to successful governance of advanced AI" - Review by David Wood, contains section "Why a pause isn’t that inconceivable"
• "Trump considering AI controls after OpenAI hacking incidents" - BBC
• "Pacing the Frontier" - A statement from over 1,300 employees of frontier AI companies
• "Why a Custom AI Just Beat Every Frontier Model" - about Thinking Machines Lab and Bridgewater
• "The On-Device LLM Revolution" - by Steve Roddy
• "AI Economics Institute (AIEI): Prospectus" - UK Government
• "Minister of State for the Future of Work" - Kate Dearden MP (LinkedIn)
• "'We Must Act Now': Sixteen Nobel Laureates Join Leading Economists and AI Researchers in Call to Prepare for AI’s Economic Transformation" - Stanford Digital Economy Lab
• "A Potential Path to Safer AI Development" by Yoshua Bengio, introduces Scientist AI
• "Bitter lesson" (general AIs will in due course out-perform specific AIs) - Wikipedia
• "Why Tool AIs Want to Be Agent AIs" - Gwern

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration