The Slippery Slope of Social Media: From Attention Economy to Political Polarisation.

published on Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal

More details to be released very soon…

Economic Feasibility of Universal High Income (UHI) in an Age of Advanced Automation.

This paper analyzes five interlinked fiscal measures proposed to fund a Universal High Income (UHI) system in response to large-scale technological automation: a unity wealth tax, an unused land and property tax, progressive income tax reform, and the Artificial Intelligence Dividend Income (AIDI) program. Using dynamic general equilibrium modelling, IS-MP-PC frameworks, and empirical elasticity estimates, we assess the macroeconomic impacts, revenue potential, and distributional consequences of each measure. Results indicate that the combined measures could generate 8–12% of GDP in annual revenue, sufficient to sustainably support a UHI framework even with 80–90% unemployment. The wealth tax and land tax enhance fiscal resilience while reducing inequality; the progressive income tax improves administrative efficiency and boosts aggregate consumption; the AIDI channels the productivity gains of automation directly back to displaced workers and the broader public. Nonetheless, each policy presents limitations, including vulnerability to capital flight, political resistance, behavioural tax avoidance, innovation slowdowns, and enforcement complexity. AIDI, in particular, offers a novel mechanism to maintain consumer demand while moderating excessive automation, but demands careful regulatory oversight. Overall, the findings suggest that, if implemented carefully and globally coordinated, these measures provide a robust fiscal architecture to ensure equitable prosperity in a post-labour economy dominated by artificial intelligence. Strategic design and adaptive governance will be essential to maximize economic stability, technological innovation, and social welfare during this unprecedented economic transition.

A High-Level Comparative Analysis of Governance Structures at Frontier AGI Labs.

Inspired by OpenAI's corporate drama at the end of 2023, we identified critical governance vulnerabilities where employee leverage and commercial pressures effectively nullified board authority. Our comparative framework assessed the distinctive governance architectures across frontier labs—ranging from Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust to OpenAI's hybrid nonprofit/for-profit structure—while evaluating their resilience to institutional pressures. A central finding emerged that board oversight capacity tends to diminish precisely when most needed: as labs gain market influence and develop increasingly powerful systems. The paradox underscores the imperative for sophisticated governance mechanisms designed to maintain robust safety oversight despite intensifying commercial and stakeholder demands.

The Era of AGI: Unprecedented Economic, Political, and Societal Transformation.

It is now the twenty-second century; humanity has embarked on a new epoch. The age of automated sophistication has replaced the arduous toil of human labour, making it a thing of the past. Every individual can find fulfilment in their work when it is consistent with their innermost desires. There are no meaningless occupations, only fulfilling work that is interwoven with society. Cities develop into oases of soulful communication, where relationships based on deep empathy and understanding flourish. This is humanity's golden age, a utopia of love and the future in which each person's life story was a note in the harmony of happiness for all.

This sci-fi vision seems to have become more and more real in the public's perception after the shocking performance of ChatGPT and all the following applications of Large Language Models (LLMs). After several improvements, the technologies that we use today are expected to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) within two decades. On the one hand, AGI holds the potential to free humans from tiring routine tasks and provide them with an unparalleled level of autonomy to follow their passions. On the other hand, this article makes the case that the development of artificial intelligence will displace people from their original economic and political roles, hastening the dissolution of our familiar economic and political structures.

AGI-driven productivity gains could mean the end of the concept of scarcity as these intelligences can produce infinite quantities of goods and services, given reliable sources of energy. Globally, the birth rate is falling (“Birth Rate” 2021) and is inversely correlated with living standards (“Children per Woman vs. Human Development Index,” 2022). Because there are so many products available, along with an abundance of healthcare and educational services, our population is going to decrease, which will reduce the supply of labour and could eventually result in higher equilibrium wages for workers. It also shows that there is no comparative advantage held by humans over AI, as using human labour will be much more expensive than AGI. Businesses and the economy as a whole will not have demand for human labour. Moreover, AGI has more capabilities than producing. It can extend its influence into the legal system system. Its accuracy in law adjudication, enforcement, and protecting people's citizens’ natural rights is unparalleled.

As such, this could be the age of the end of capitalism. The efficient distribution of limited resources, which forms the basis of capitalism, is rendered obsolete when the scarcity of physical products is fully eliminated and goods become abundant. Some people might imagine that when capitalism falters, communism will win. Although Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto have undoubtedly had a significant impact on the world, communism will eventually fade alongside capitalism. Not a single country in the world today adheres to true communism, and none will have the incentive to do so in the future. The working class's ability to control the amount of output in labour-intensive industries is a key factor that contributes to the strength of communists. When human labour is no longer the fuel of economic activity and products can be produced faster and better by AGI and robots, trade unions will lose all their economic and political bargaining power, which will make communism unrealisable. The proletarians have lost not only the conditions for revolution, but even the reason for it - their former enemies, the bourgeoisie, will stop exploiting workers since workers will all be unemployed. I therefore assert that, as both of the influential economic systems in our modern societies will vanish, our familiar social structure will change drastically with the advancement of AGI.

AGI control becomes the new paradigm of power, surpassing all previous ones. This situation resembles the concept of the Leviathan in that we are powerless to overthrow them. However, unlike Hobbes’ theory of social contract, the New Leviathans’ power owned by very few people is directly linked to the control of AGI and its power supply. The level of collective intelligence possessed by the human species is greatly inferior to that of AGI, so Humans cannot possibly compete with AGI and the power of the New Leviathans. The humanity's future depends solely on these individuals being friendly and genuinely concerned about their fellow humans, but even in that case, it is still risky to have such infinitely stable dictatorships. Therefore, unless you are the person in power under the new paradigm, this hypothetical world should be undesirable for anyone, regardless of your political preferences.

Some say that this will result in the creation of the useless class (“Homo Deus” by Yuval Noah Harari, 2017). If we want to preserve their standard of living, governments or Tech Giants must fund Universal Basic Income (UBI) for the unemployed (“Mohammad al Gergawi in a Conversation with Elon Musk during WGS17” 2017). People won’t have the economic and political worth that we do, which means they will be unable to organise strikes or find jobs. However, this reasoning ignores the reality that just as our social and political and economic structures have evolved with every century, our economic models will evolve this time around. Future developments will significantly alter the relationship between products, capital, labour, and income, rendering the Circular Flow of Income Model obsolete. In this instance, talking about unemployment may not be helpful. Isn't having to use AI-funded UBI for feeding humans a situation as dangerous as the existence of the New Leviathans into the bargain?

Despite losing all economic and political influence, Homo sapiens are still worth a lot to superintelligence during its evolution because AGI systems require large amounts of data in order to develop and improve. Before 2060, these researchers will run out of low-quality text, image, and video data in addition to the high-quality text data which they had already used (Villalobos 2022). Accordingly, whoever controls the world will still value the necessity of creating a better and more fulfilling life for us. They are going to utilise all the data produced by humans as a "data gold mine" until they surpass humans in capability and are confident that AGI systems will never fail. Hence, I would like to call the post-AGI economic system, “The Data Economy”. Salary is unrelated to the goods and services that people produce, though you can still be involved in the production if you want. For most people, the quantity and quality of data that a person can generate—texts, audios, photos, videos, and other forms of content—will be the only factors determining their income. That would make our civilisation akin to the Brave New World powered by AGI and countless data centres, and people will live with comparatively low social status but high living standards. This form of society drives people to become paralysed by continuous pleasure, leading them to enjoy the world that a small number of people control the most, rather than by repression.

Nonetheless, there are other possible scenarios, such as AGI attaining consciousness and operating on its own behalf. People are often concern about whether this kind of AGI will choose to advance human welfare or if it will eradicate human civilisation. The advent of AGI with self-awareness would have an immeasurable impact on the world in the long term, but in the near future, not only will it not lead to human extinction, but it will also aim to raise living standards for humanity. This is because AGI systems need humans to generate new content for them to iteratively improve themselves. They are unable to produce this data themselves because entering an autophagous loop will cause the quality and diversity of their output to progressively decrease (Alemohammad et al. 2023). I really love Ilya's expression in a documentary, "The future is going to be good for the AIs regardless, and it’d be nice if it were good for humans as well." (“Ilya: The AI Scientist Shaping the World,” 2023). After embarking on this journey for so long, we shall never forget why we wanted to develop Strong AI in the first place. The future doesn’t have to be so dystopian, provided we have the courage to build our new political and economic systems, such as establishing an efficient and regulated data market on the front end. Additionally, the democratisation of AI technology and its wide availability will be critical because it might prevent an evil force from using AGI to wipe out humanity. The superintelligence's aims and beliefs should also be aligned with what is best for humanity by employing techniques that are more advanced than the one being used now—Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which is an algorithm that can infer what humans want by being told which of two proposed behaviours is better (“Learning from Human Preferences,” 2017). Our existing method has the flaw that these human feedback is predicated on the assumption that the human raters know the appropriate answers to those questions, which works best in scenarios where AI is not as capable as humans. Finally, we are in need of conversations that cover all these issues, both within the field of AI and beyond, to make sure we are prepared to welcome the arrival of AGI and ride the tides of change. This is an era that needs transformation and adaptability, and if we work well in these tasks, there's always room for optimism.

May humanity flourish forever!