AI will be less tool like and more agent like in my view.
it’s not clear to me that this distinction is real, or would matter even if it is real. from my perspective, looking up, i am an agent within the company i work within. from the employer’s perspective, looking down, i am a tool to drive revenue. this relation exists all the way up through to the C-suite, and then the hedge funds and retirement fund managers, and back around to the employees who own those funds. in our capitalist system of ownership every agent is also someone else’s tool.
recessions, bubbles etc (but really any rare-ish economic event) are incredibly hard to model because the length of time the economic system has existed is actually relatively short so we don’t have that large a sample size. That point can be extrapolated across to this situation almost exactly.
our economic systems have weathered all these events. if your point is that AI is of the same class as bubbles/recessions, then shouldn’t the takeaway be that our economic systems can handle it — just expecting it to be as painful as any other economic swing?
i suppose i probably just don’t understand what you mean when you speak of “rethinking” the economic system. that sounds like a revolutionary change, whereas for the dominant economic systems today, looking back i can trace what is more of an evolutionary path from the dawn of cities/trade up to the present day. the only time i can say we’ve “rethought” our economic system is when various countries tried to pivot from their established distributed system to a centrally managed system of production more or less “overnight”.
it’s not clear to me that this distinction is real, or would matter even if it is real. from my perspective, looking up, i am an agent within the company i work within. from the employer’s perspective, looking down, i am a tool to drive revenue. this relation exists all the way up through to the C-suite, and then the hedge funds and retirement fund managers, and back around to the employees who own those funds. in our capitalist system of ownership every agent is also someone else’s tool.
our economic systems have weathered all these events. if your point is that AI is of the same class as bubbles/recessions, then shouldn’t the takeaway be that our economic systems can handle it — just expecting it to be as painful as any other economic swing?
i suppose i probably just don’t understand what you mean when you speak of “rethinking” the economic system. that sounds like a revolutionary change, whereas for the dominant economic systems today, looking back i can trace what is more of an evolutionary path from the dawn of cities/trade up to the present day. the only time i can say we’ve “rethought” our economic system is when various countries tried to pivot from their established distributed system to a centrally managed system of production more or less “overnight”.