PostAGI Podcast

Everybody losing their job is the same prediction as everybody becoming a billionaire. Scott Sumner works through that on this episode of the PostAGI podcast with Sreeram Kannan and Soubhik Deb.

Scott spent decades on monetary economics, the gold standard and the Great Depression, which gives him a different set of reference points for AI than most people in this conversation have. He ranks the three risks of the AGI era, safety, concentration and labor displacement, and puts safety at the top while calling the other two manageable.

On jobs he expects replacement to run slower than the forecasts suggest, partly because of bottlenecks in how AI gets deployed and partly because governments resist laying people off. He points to firefighters, where fire safety improved enough that the US carries roughly twice as many as it needs, and nobody cuts them because they are heroes. If it does move fast, the same math produces superabundance, a per capita GDP measured in the billions, and redistribution gets politically easy at that scale. His comparison is medieval aristocrats who considered work beneath them.

On safety he takes a position that runs against the field. Ethics and intelligence are positively correlated in his view, where intelligence means education and knowledge rather than raw IQ, and the ethic that grows with knowledge is sympathy for the other. People cared more about whales once they learned whales sing to each other. He expects a superintelligence to come out fairly ethical, and he doesn't think it will treat us like ants, since it will know we built it. What worries him is a well aligned AI taking orders from someone who wants a virus.

The conversation ends on why capitalism needs altruism to function, and why power spread across many AI agents produces better outcomes than one agent holding all of it.

Samuel Hammond is director of AI policy and chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, a Washington DC think tank working on technology policy and the institutions that govern it. He has written extensively on state capacity, AI governance, and why every major technology wave forces equally transformative change in the institutions around it.
Sam thinks governments will be overwhelmed and displaced by AI, potentially quite quickly. AGI is fundamentally an organizational shock, and government is just another organization, just a much bigger one. If it doesn't reform itself fast enough, it goes the way of Blockbuster. His prescription starts with monitoring and state capacity, but ultimately means government that is grown rather than designed, where formal rulemaking gives way to objective functions that agents solve for.
We get into why courts still using human stenographers will lose ground to AI arbitration systems processing thousands of contracts a minute, what a community-notes model for FDA drug approval could look like, the legibility arms race where AI makes some parts of the world radically more transparent and others radically less, and Inspector General GPT, a model with full audit trails into an agent-run government reporting instantly back to Congress.
PostAGI is a podcast from Eigen Labs exploring economics, labor, capital, and governance heading into AGI.
The conversation ends with the most contrarian bet of the season: something resembling state collapse by the early 2030s, and a future of city states with drone defenses while the hinterland becomes a no-go zone.

Allison Duettmann is the President and CEO of the Foresight Institute, a San Francisco nonprofit advancing frontier technology, including AI, biotechnology, and nanotechnology, for the long-term benefit of life. She founded Existential Hope and is a leading voice in human-AI cooperation.
Allison thinks the public's fear of AI is understandable, but that fear without imagination gets us nowhere. In this episode she makes the case for applying AI to science today instead of waiting for AGI to solve everything, and explains why leaving that work to a handful of closed labs would be a mistake.
We get into the open science experiments her team runs, including a community effort that outperformed one of Google's quantum computing results, and a decentralized inference network built entirely out of MacBooks. She explains why sovereign compute matters as prices climb and access tightens, how cryptography finally lets networks stay open and private at the same time, and why AI might lower the coordination costs that have always made large scale collaboration hard.
PostAGI is a podcast from Eigen Labs exploring economics, labor, capital, and governance heading into AGI.
The conversation ends somewhere unexpected: superintelligence as something we already have in the form of civilization, and why Allison signs people up for the future in the most literal way possible.

Cremieux Recueil joins PostAGI to talk about the state of biotech and open science heading into AGI.
In about ten years China went from copying Western drugs to being the country America now copies. We get into how that happened, the deregulation and pricing moves behind it, and why so much of biotech's frontier has shifted there. From there the conversation opens up to a bigger question: whether science stays open at all as AI labs start pulling more of the stack in-house, and what AGI does to any of it.
PostAGI explores economics, labor, capital, and governance in a world after AGI. The recurring worry: AGI defaults toward concentrating power, and coordination is what pushes back.

After AGI, the real question isn't whether machines can do the work. It's who owns the intelligence, and whether any of it is built for you.
In this episode of the PostAGI Podcast, Soubhik Deb and Sreeram Kannan talk with Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Intelligent Internet, founder of Stability AI, and author of The Last Economy. Emad argues the AI debate is trapped between two dead ends, let the market rip or regulate it to a halt, and lays out a third path built on ownership and coordination.
We cover the end of knowledge work and the $1.50 robot, why he thinks OpenAI and Anthropic get nationalized, his plan for a community-owned AI company in every state and country, why your AI is working for someone who isn't you, how a few books can backdoor any model, and the physics his team says was missing for 121 years.
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