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Fellowship Syllabus

Economics of Transformative AI

As artificial intelligence advances, companies and countries face economic pressures to prioritize capability development over safety, increasing catastrophic and existential risks from AGI. This fellowship examines how economics shapes AI safety decisions, and vice versa — using economic reasoning to explore future trajectories of AI and to understand how tools such as markets, industrial policy, regulation, and international coordination can meaningfully reduce existential risk. For a comprehensive overview of the academic literature, we recommend Agrawal, Brynjolfsson, and Korinek's The Economics of Transformative AI.

Week 01

Why Does the Economics of AI Matter for Existential Risk?

Non-aligned AI could be dangerous, potentially resulting in existential risks — and many such risks would transmit, at least in part, through economic channels. Conversely, economics offers toolkits and frameworks that can help society navigate AI. This week provides a primer on the links between AI safety and economics, drawing on the latest scenarios, forecasts, and threat models.

  • AI 2027

    The AI Futures Project's narrative forecast, providing concrete scenarios and reference points for AI development and how things could go right or wrong.

  • Scenario Planning for an A(G)I Future

    Anton Korinek explains how economic policymaking needs to adapt to different AI scenarios.

Week 02

How Might AI Impact Economic Growth?

Experts disagree on how AI might impact economic growth. Under some scenarios, superintelligence combined with advanced robotics boosts growth so much that current institutions struggle to keep up and the share of AI-related activities in GDP approaches 100%. Under others, AI boosts productivity but long-term growth rates change little from the baseline, due to bottlenecks such as physical infrastructure, raw materials, or an AI capabilities slowdown. This week explores these disagreements and what different scenarios mean for AI safety.

Week 03

How Might AI Impact Jobs and Power?

AI is already changing the nature of jobs — what could AGI or ASI do to the labour market? Some argue that a system at least as good as the best human at any computer-based task could wipe out white-collar employment, and that AI-developed robotics would leave an ever-diminishing niche for human labour. Others argue that comparative advantage will always leave a role for humans. Economies that rely more on AI and less on human labour could also concentrate power in the hands of the few who control AI and capital. This week unpacks these dynamics and explores how society might function in an AI-driven economy.

Week 04

What Are the Strategic Dynamics Between AI Actors?

Existing strategic incentives are among the greatest drivers of unsafe AI development. Economic tools such as game theory help explain why dangerous racing dynamics persist between frontier labs and between countries, while microeconomic concepts such as externalities and asymmetric information shed light on how governments and markets can shape the incentives of AI labs. This week explores these dynamics primarily through an interactive table-top exercise simulating an intelligence takeoff.

Week 05

How Can Economics Inform Society's Approach to AI?

As a field, economics offers many ways to shape the safe development of AI. Economic analysis shapes how public policy is developed and adopted, economic theory informs parts of technical alignment, and economic thinking helps us understand the dynamics of AGI alongside tools from computer science, political science, and philosophy. This week wraps up the fellowship by looking at practical steps fellows can take to make AI safer through economics.