CONCEPT
Building Dams (Deaton Reading)
The institutional structures required to direct the AI surplus toward broadly shared welfare — infrastructure, education, labor market policy, governance of AI development, international coordination — built at the speed the transition demands.
Building dams is the metaphor Edo Segal uses in You On AI for the institutional work of redirecting the current of AI capability toward life rather than away from it. Deaton's framework gives the metaphor specific, empirically grounded content. The dams are the institutional structures — infrastructure investment, educational reform, labor market policy, AI governance, international coordination — that determine whether the surplus generated by the AI transition reaches the populations that need it most. The dams are expensive, politically difficult, and institutionally complex. They are also, as Deaton's career demonstrates, the variable that distinguishes transitions that produce broadly shared progress from transitions that produce new and more durable inequality.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The first dam is investment in digital infrastructure for underserved populations — not merely connectivity but the complete ecosystem that AI-augmented work requires: reliable electricity, affordable devices, high-speed internet, and the maintenance systems that keep infrastructure functional over time. The