Getting ahead of
AI's economic disruption

"In the AI gold rush, Korea supplies the picks and shovels." That was the most striking comment from our Seoul workshop, describing how chipmakers Samsung and SK Hynix are benefiting from the AI boom.

That's both an opportunity and a problem for South Korea. Chip prices are notoriously cyclical, and rival memory-makers and shifting export controls are already working to route around the country's advantage. That instability creates an interesting dilemma for the country's leadership: how to direct today's AI-driven gains to alleviate social inequalities, against a revenue stream that could narrow the moment a rival catches up?

Brazil can move emergency cash at enormous scale. During COVID-19, Auxílio Emergencial reached about 66 million people within weeks. Yet workers displaced by AI could still fall through the gaps in ordinary times.

Our new Brazil case study applies Windfall's Welfare Resilience Assessment Framework to a country with impressive digital-state capacity and a weak transition architecture.

What does AI preparedness look like in an economy where more than 80% of employment is informal?

A new case study by Emma Kimani, Raphael Gregorian and Deric Cheng applies Windfall’s Welfare Resilience Assessment Framework to Kenya.

Most AI-and-jobs research asks: which occupations are most exposed? A second question follows from it: if that exposure translates into disruption, would the welfare system be prepared to handle the impacts?

A new paper we published today by Avinash Kothuri, Raphael Gregorian and Deric Cheng addresses that second question.

AI is poised to remake how the world thinks, works, earns. Why wouldn't it require building a new financial system?

"Do we need a new Bretton Woods?" asks Windfall's CEO Adrian Brown on Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)'s AI Policy podcast, hosted by Aalok Mehta.

JOIN US in NYC at United Nations General Assembly week for a conversation on 'AI: Who Benefits, Who Pays?'

On Sept 24, Anna Yelizarova will join Rest of World for a live event during UNGA Week on AI's transformation of the global economy, and what it will take to balance rapid innovation with equitable growth.

"If the productivity boost from AI is large enough to transform any country’s fiscal arithmetic, vast job disruption is probably coming, meaning more spending on unemployed workers. Income may also shift from labour to capital, which is more lightly taxed."

This week, nearly 200 economists and technology leaders signed a public statement warning that advanced AI could bring serious economic disruption: to jobs, to wages, and to how broadly prosperity is shared. Windfall's Adrian Brown is a signatory…