Central bankers are some of the most powerful people in the world, and we should all pay attention to what they’re saying and hearing. With that in mind, I have troubling news. According to Reuters’ Wednesday report from the European Central Bank’s annual meeting in Sintra, Portugal, AI is being talked about like a thousand-mile-wide UFO hovering above Europe. According to Reuters, nearly every time anyone had a conversation, AI came up. Quotes collected by Reuters from scared and/or excited central bankers—along with experts who attended the event—are, well, chilling when taken all together. I’ve extracted the choice artifacts so they can be more easily dug up and studied after the dust settles. Crypto-loving U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh played the role of cheerleader, or perhaps bubble-inflator. “This is the biggest time of consequence to each of our economies, I think, in our lifetime,” Warsh said, and added, “Who knew when the internet was born that the internet was going to create a million and a half jobs as Uber drivers? We are in the first to second inning of this revolution.”
Richard Tiffany “Tiff” Macklem, Governor of the Bank of Canada also compared what’s happening now to the rise of the internet—but in a laudatory way. “The internet proved to be better than anybody imagined, created whole new businesses, but we still got the dotcom bubble,” Macklem said, adding a slight warning to his oddball assessment of one of the worst inventions in human history.
