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Millions of words have been written about artificial intelligence — popularly known as AI — and billions more will be written over the next few years. Advocates point to its benefits — allowing doctors to make better diagnoses of health issues, for instance, or allowing scientists to create new technologies in the lab that lead to better, cheaper batteries. Those benefits are real and are not to be dismissed lightly.
Yet there is a growing chorus of detractors who are concerned that AI may have long-term effects that are not so beneficial. Paul Krugman this week had a discussion with Heather Cox Richardson in which he discussed how AI mania resembles previous economic bubbles — from tulip mania in Amsterdam in 1636, to Bernie Madoff, to the dot-com crash, to the California gold rush, and to the global financial meltdown that began in 2007.
Just the sheer number of those events suggests there is something about the human psyche that inevitably leads to such boom/bust scenarios. Krugman cites economist Robert Shiller, who said “a bubble is a natural Ponzi scheme. It’s something where you get in and you make money because other people get in, and people keep on coming in because everybody before them made money. But in the end, it’s a game where the money isn’t really there. It all depends on fresh crops of suckers coming in. And at some point you run out of suckers.”
