LFP 128: Adrian Brown - Windfall Trust and the Economic Singularity

What happens if AI delivers major advances in capability and productivity, but also creates significant disruption to jobs, incomes, and public finances? That question sits at the heart of today’s episode.

Our guest is Adrian Brown, the Founder and Chief Executive of Windfall Trust, a nonprofit focused on helping governments and societies prepare for the economic consequences of advanced AI. Windfall describes itself not as a think tank, but as a “policy accelerator for the age of artificial intelligence”.

Their work starts from a simple premise: if AI systems significantly reshape the economy, then the question is not only how we build them, but how we prepare for their impacts, and how the gains are ultimately shared.

Before founding Windfall Trust, Adrian was the founding Executive Director of the Centre for Public Impact, worked as a policy advisor in the UK Cabinet Office, and held roles at McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group.

Selected follow-ups:

• Windfall Trust
• Exercise Cygnus (Wikipedia)
• Erik Brynjolfsson (personal site)
• Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence (paper by Erik Brynjolfsson and colleagues)
• Anton Korinek (personal site)
• Windfall's UK Scenarios exercise
• The Economic Singularity (recent discussion paper by Calum Chace)
• Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age (OpenAI)
• UK Government announcement of the formation of "The AI and Future of Work Unit"
• UK Chancellor Rachel Reeve's announcement of a new "AI Economics Institute"
• "AI will kill income tax" - episode of Robert Peston's podcast "The Rest is Money"
• Windfall Policy Atlas
• Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models (METR)

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

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