AI will make regulation much less burdensome

In a widely dunked tweet, smart-twitter’s village idiot Roko argues that centrally planned economies will work better than market economies due to today’s compute. As many have correctly pointed out, this is a flawed argument seeing as compute alone doesn’t solve the issue of information aggregation.

But the debate gives rise to an interesting question. How will AI change government policy-making?

One answer is that AI will vastly expand the production-possibility frontier of net-beneficial government policies.

I claim that AI will change the cost-benefit trade-off in favor of more regulation. When AI can correctly fill out a complicated tax-form for just a few cents, the regulatory burden of complicated tax rules drops significantly.

If humans are the ones filling out forms, tax rules need to be (and too often fail to be) simple and fast to fill out. Once AI can fill out the forms, adding a hundred edge-cases to internalize various positive externalities is now a reasonable idea!

Most can agree it would be insane to add a minuscule tax-benefit for those who opted to plant the most co2-reducing bushes their gardens. The time spent on claiming and administrating the benefits would far outweigh the social benefits of the slight co2 reduction encouraged.

With AI, complicated policies filled with quirks and edge-cases now look far more attractive. The inane policies that left me shrieking, all of a sudden don’t look so bad! As administration costs decrease, the possible policies that are net-beneficial radically increase.

For many, the most persuasive argument for libertarianism is avoiding the enormous deadweight loss that arises from government overregulation. AI makes this argument a lot weaker, and the benefits of social democracies look much less costly.