🔮 Democratic AI; local economies; synthetic biology; rare earths, crypto heroes ++ #380

Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies.

In last week’s Sunday Commentary I look at how our understanding of security in Europe is shifting👇

🔮 Sunday Commentary: What is it Good For?

The near future

🧵 Welcome our AI overlords
Loved this publication from DeepMind: Democratic AI, an experiment to design a social mechanism of allocation of resources that would be preferred by a majority. The system trained a deep reinforcement learning agent on human feedback about societal wealth allocation. The outcome was neither a dog-eat-dog libertariana or an aggressive egalitarianism. Rather, the winning configuration of societal resources redistributed funds to “people in proportion to their relative rather than absolute contribution,” taking into account initial endowments. Secondly, the system “especially rewarded players whose relative contribution was more generous, perhaps encouraging others to do like…