Economics of Transformative AI: Materials List

Research and Sense-Making
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Economics of Transformative AI: Materials List

Meta-note: initially discussed in another form on the Life Itself general chat. transferred to the forum as an archive and place for future discussion. Still more to add, just throwing this up here as a start - better incomplete and shipped, than in development hell haha

Initial frame and request for recommendations from @rufuspollock

Rufus Pollock Interested to do some medium term sensemaking re AI and its near term socio economic implications. If anyone has some good recommendations on reading on nearish term pathways, socio economic implications etc that would be very welcome. (Note: I am not looking for so much on philosophical side, consciousness etc or existential risk)

Leading Courses

Economics of Transformative AI (ETAI) - Stanford

  • a high-level course recommended by Will MacAskill (Forethought & Centre for Effective Altruism)

Economics of TAI - BlueDot Impact

  • part of a primary education pipeline for AI safety and talent

Recommended Papers

Agentic Inequality by Iason Gabriel (Google DeepMind)

  • discusses how agentic AI systems might exacerbate existing inequalities.

The Intelligence Curse & Gradual Disempowerment

  • theoretical frameworks on how humanity might lose agency over time through incremental integration of AI into critical societal systems.

Institutions at the Forefront

Windfall Trust

AGI Social Contract

  • A summit/initiative exploring the new “social contract” required in an AGI-enabled world.

  • Recent summit: held at Emerge Lakefront, a developmental space and collaborator of Life Itself

Books

The Last Economy: A Guide to the Age of Intelligent Economics

  • Provides historical context before outlining future economic possibilities.
  • Attribution: Recommended by @ilannnnn from the whatsapp group

Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race to Build Machine Superintelligence (forthcoming spring 2026)

  • By a journalist critical of the economic context in which AI development is occurring

  • Previously published in Jacobin Can Humanity Survive AI?

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Not just theory for me … I’ll be revisiting all these sources for potential impact on a set of active projects. Namely:

Getting ready to revise Ch 19 (Artificial Intelligence) and Ch 20 (Futurism) in a forthcoming 20 chapter open-source Introduction to Information Technology text.

Gearing up for an engagement with a Seattle College in Q1 2026 to consult on CS program revisions to improve student employment outcomes. AI is of course a key factor in the current throttling of entry-level opportunities.

With a graduate student team, working with @dvdjsph of this forum on his https://www.promise.foundation/. The general theme from my POV is agentic AI governance, guardrails, alignment, and orchestration.

I’ll be interested of any of the content you have so generously shared above would suggest desirable adjustments to the trajectories of any of the projects I have listed. If anyone is familiar with @MaxRamsahoye ‘s content and has any immediate ideas, please do share!

Update: After two quick skim readings of all of it, https://gradual-disempowerment.ai/ seems most pertinent to my concerns. That framework hooks my macro framework in interesting ways.