Introducing the Windfall Policy Atlas
There has been significant amounts of public discussion about the potential labor markets of AI, but relatively little serious discussion and research on what society should do in response if significant disruption occurs. Governments do not have a plan in the case that AI causes massive labor displacement. For that reason, we’re launching the Windfall Policy Atlas: a structured overview of policy proposals to respond to the economic disruption from transformative AI systems.
At Windfall Trust, our mission is to ensure the economic benefits of transformative AI are broadly shared, not captured by the few. Our theory of change involves increasing the awareness that massive economic disruption is possible, and then guiding governments and societies towards large-scale economic solutions by providing research, tooling, and active support for the rapidly developing field of AI economic policy.
Consequently, we’re interested in raising the profile of excellent policy proposals to increase societal awareness and preparedness in the case that transformative economic scenarios occur. We intend for this Atlas to provide some cohesion for the discussion in this emerging domain, spanning a wide range of topics – from near-term volatility and job displacement, to the potential structural disempowerment of human labor in the long-term.
Public & Social Investments
Support systems for citizens during economic description
Labor Market Adaptation
How can workers, firms, and education systems adapt to an AI-transformed economy?
Wealth Capture
What mechanisms can ensure AI-driven productivity gains are captured for the public benefit?
Regulation & Market Design
What mechanisms can ensure AI-driven productivity gains are captured for the public benefit?
Global Coordination
How can international cooperation ensure the benefits of AGI are shared globally?
Intellectual Property Reform
Regulatory Agencies
AI Liability
Legal Economic Personhood
Public Utility Regulation
Regulatory Markets
Fiscal Automatic Stabilizers
Monetary Policy Responses
Antitrust Law
Public Benefit Corporations
Fiduciary Mandates
Public Board Representation
Minority Public Ownership
Procurement Policies
Public-Private Partnerships
Our Atlas divides TAI economic policies into five broad categories: public & social spending, labor market adaptation, wealth capture, regulation & market design, and global coordination. These categories should be exhaustive but not mutually exclusive: that is, any relevant economic policy should be able to be placed within at least one of these categories, but may also fit two or more.
Within each category, we’ve broken down the topics into subcategories (e.g. “Taxation Mechanisms”) and specific policy topics (e.g. “Wealth Taxes”). For each policy topic, we provide a lightweight summary, point towards current proposals & recommended readings, and give examples of real-world precedents. We’ve done our best to prioritize proposals that explicitly address the potential for AI economic disruption: however, we also include excellent pieces that discuss the policy topic from a more general lens when relevant.
Policy Snapshot
Universal Basic Capital / Equity
Content
Rate of Disruption
Risk Horizon
Governance
Who It Affects
Decision Maker
We’ve also classified policies along several different axes to make this Atlas easier to search and interpret. For instance, some policies are most relevant in scenarios with more moderate acceleration, where AI causes only moderate job loss in certain industries and largely is used as a supplement for many forms of human labor. Others are more relevant for scenarios with rapid automation across many categories, with dramatic job losses and a measurable shift of income from labor to capital. Others are relevant for all scenarios.
Similarly, the types of risks that individual policies are meant to counteract varies widely. At Windfall Trust, we’re developing a framework that categorizes potential risks into three high-level topics:
Volatility Risks (Near-Term)
Risks that test the short-run capacity of households and welfare systems to respond to acute shocks to income and access to essential services.
Transition Risks (Medium-Term)
Risks that challenge the capacity of labor markets to absorb shifts in skills, occupational structures, and industries as we transition into an economy increasingly driven by AI.
Structural Risks (Long-Term)
Risks that address new equilibria as the economy is broadly restructured by the diffusion of powerful AI. Concerns include the potential decoupling of growth from human development, entrenched inequality, and irreversible concentrations of economic power.
This framework is intended to help policymakers identify sets of policies that are responsive to a wide range of underlying societal challenges. Even in scenarios with very rapid timelines, some policies from each category will likely need to be deployed to protect human labor through successive stages of economic transformation.
In total, our Atlas presents roughly 45 policy ideas. We believe this is a fairly comprehensive overview of the high-level interventions currently in the public discussion, though there are certainly plenty of more nuanced and country-specific strategies available. We’ll plan to regularly update this Atlas as new research emerges in this rapidly developing domain – if you have a proposal you would like to include, please share it with us in this form.
It is increasingly clear that governments need to have a concrete gameplan in the case of substantial AI economic disruption. Such a gameplan should probably seek to capture economic rents from AI technologies, redistribute these rents into the economy to stabilize labor markets and benefit societies, and design effective market incentives and regulation to more broadly distribute the gains from AI.
Governments will need to rethink their educational programs, active labor market policies, and social safety nets. They may need to cooperate with powerful firms or other governments to create these changes on the necessary scale. In the long run, they may need to find new mechanisms of redistribution to cope with structural inequalities and labor disempowerment.
Today, governments are just beginning to become aware that this is a pressing issue. Relatively few policymakers are engaging with the topic of AI’s economic impacts seriously – even fewer are starting to envision what policy solutions will be necessary. None have an action plan in the case that dramatic economic shocks arrive in the next five years. This must change now.
We hope this project can serve as a starting point for policymakers looking to develop a gameplan around AI economic disruption in the upcoming years. We plan to release more tools and frameworks in the coming months to further help policymakers identify scenarios, specific risks, and structural changes to enable policy interventions in their own countries.
Finally, we intend to coordinate closely with national nonprofits and policymakers to prepare country-specific action plans. Governments need to be prepared for the potential of drastic economic disruption. If you’d like to work with us on this topic, please reach out to us here.
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