As with the agricultural and industrial revolutions before it, the intelligence revolution currently underway will unlock new degrees and kinds of abundance. Powerful forms of AI will likely generate never-before-seen levels of wealth, raising critical questions about its beneficiaries. Will this newfound wealth be used to provide for the common good, or will it become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few who wield AI technologies? Cullen O'Keefe joins us on this episode of the FLI Podcast for a conversation about the Windfall Clause, a mechanism that attempts to ensure the abundance and wealth created by transformative AI benefits humanity globally.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-What the Windfall Clause is and how it might function

-The need for such a mechanism given AGI generated economic windfall

-Problems the Windfall Clause would help to remedy 

-The mechanism for distributing windfall profit and the function for defining such profit

-The legal permissibility of the Windfall Clause 

-Objections and alternatives to the Windfall Clause

You can find the page for this podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2020/02/28/distributing-the-benefits-of-ai-via-the-windfall-clause-with-cullen-okeefe/

Timestamps: 

0:00 Intro

2:13 What is the Windfall Clause? 

4:51 Why do we need a Windfall Clause? 

06:01 When we might reach windfall profit and what that profit looks like

08:01 Motivations for the Windfall Clause and its ability to help with job loss

11:51 How the Windfall Clause improves allocation of economic windfall 

16:22 The Windfall Clause assisting in a smooth transition to advanced AI systems

18:45 The Windfall Clause as assisting with general norm setting

20:26 The Windfall Clause as serving AI firms by generating goodwill, improving employee relations, and reducing political risk

23:02 The mechanism for distributing windfall profit and desiderata for guiding it’s formation 

25:03 The windfall function and desiderata for guiding it’s formation 

26:56 How the Windfall Clause is different from being a new taxation scheme

30:20 Developing the mechanism for distributing the windfall 

32:56 The legal permissibility of the Windfall Clause in the United States

40:57 The legal permissibility of the Windfall Clause in China and the Cayman Islands

43:28 Historical precedents for the Windfall Clause

44:45 Objections to the Windfall Clause

57:54 Alternatives to the Windfall Clause

01:02:51 Final thoughts

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