DeepMind Hires an 'AGI Economist' to Predict the Post-AI Economy

What happens to the economy when machines are smarter than every human economist combined? That's the question Google DeepMind wants to answer. So it's hiring an economist to find out.

The University of Chicago Booth School of Business is losing a behavioral economist to Google DeepMind. Alex Imas is joining the AI lab as Director of AGI Economics, reporting directly to DeepMind co-founder and chief AGI scientist Shane Legg.

His team will study how cutting-edge AI systems could systemically reshape the economy, focusing on five areas: labor market changes, wealth and power distribution, how institutions adapt, AI agents' impact on markets, and building models to simulate a future that might look nothing like the past. Imas has taken a leave of absence from his faculty position.

The role was first posted by Legg in January under the title "Chief AGI Economist" and is based in London. The job listing explicitly said the mission is to "look beyond near-term impacts and ask fundamental questions about the economics of a post-AGI world," including designing agent-based economic simulations (where large numbers of virtual agents interact to model an economy) and rethinking basic assumptions about scarcity and resource allocation. Imas's research at Chicago straddles behavioral economics and AI applications; he co-authored The Winner's Curse with Nobel laureate Richard Thaler.