AI Safety Poland Talks #8

​Welcome to AI Safety Poland Talks!

​​A biweekly series where researchers, professionals, and enthusiasts from Poland or connected to the Polish AI community share their work on AI Safety.

​💁 Topic: The Economics of Transformative AI: Hardware, Software, and p(doom)
📣 Speaker: Jakub Growiec
🇬🇧 Language: English
🗓️ Date: 19.02.2026, 18:00
📍 Location: Online

​Speaker Bio
Jakub is a Professor and Head of Department of Quantitative Economics at SGH Warsaw School of Economics. His research interests include the theory of long-run economic growth and technological change, and the economics of transformative AI.

​Abstract
What will be the economic consequences of transformative AI? In this talk, I address this question from two angles. First, based on a novel hardware-software framework, I argue that transformative AI will likely make human cognitive work substitutable, rather than complementary, to AI. This will bring a substantial acceleration of economic growth, but also a major reduction in the labor share of output. But the consequences may go far beyond that. In the second part of the talk, I will consider the existential risk arising in the scenario of AI takeover. How much would the benevolent social planner pay to avoid existential risk from transformative AI? Depending on some key parameters, would humanity be better off with or without TAI?