The promise of artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t short of promotion. What needs an amp-up, arguably, is how profoundly AI might change power equations. In an interview last week with The Economist’s editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, author Yuval Noah Harari offered a truly stark analogy.
“The human financial system controls the lives of cows and chickens, but they have no idea that finance even exists. This is likely to be our position in 10 years,” he said, if the world continues along today’s AI path.
Finance is already too complex for most of us, he added, so humans will increasingly let AI take financial decisions, AI models will create ever more complex products, and if there’s a big market crash, befuddled policymakers may have no choice but to do what AI says.
The rise of crypto, Harari reminded us, was a significant vote of trust in algorithms over human monetary policy.
Dystopian as an AI-directed economy sounds, we can’t brush aside the prospect. It’s plausible. At one level, whose interests these bots ultimately serve must be put to closer scrutiny.
At another, we must ponder what sustains confidence in human authority and why AI diffusion needn’t land us in some sort of animal farm.