Sam Hammond is is Chief Economist at the Foundation for American Innovation. He discusses:
How collapsing transaction costs could push towards privatised alternatives to government functions
“Distributed denial of service” attacks against courts and regulators
What happens when existing laws can be more perfectly enforced with AI
Estonia’s government-as-API, as a model for AGI-era governance
Whether 20th-century social democracy depends on 20th-century technology
The UAE as a preview of post-scarcity governance
Mormons, religion, and social scaffolding in secular societies
Here’s a link to the full transcript.
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I enjoyed this episode a lot. There's rarely reason to comment on podcast episodes but I was struck by a missing tone about the UAE.
Fin: I guess if you're a citizen or a tourist, I would imagine the conditions are pretty different for guest workers. Maybe I'm wrong.
Sam: They're better than others. So Qatar is pretty bad. I think Saudi is somewhere in between the political culture, and UAE is very westernized. And they're fighting proxy wars in Africa over this. They are forces for a more secular, liberal enlightenment orientation to Islam, where it almost—I didn't hear Islam really mentioned once at all.
It's worth mentioning that the UAE is probably supporting the RSF in the Sudanese civil war, which some estimate from satellite imagery were responsible for killing ~60k residents of El Fasher. Seems like probably a lower bound on the killing. I think this contexts makes me imagine the UAE as a model of the AGI future profoundly bleaker.