The future of economics in an AI-biased world
Economists are not immune to automation. Going by the current trends in automated intelligence in economic modelling, sooner or later, technological unemployment will catch up with economists (with different levels of impact). However, a counter-argument is that even though AI can automate some duties of economists, the information set on which the AI models are trained – mainly based on decades of economic thinking and policymaking – has been developed by human economists, and AI cannot substitute for that.
This critique might be valid about the traditional class of supervised AI machines in a limited computational capacity, but the new generation of AI models – some unsupervised or using Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms – that can boundlessly search, iterate and artificially test the possible relations among the infinite set of variables (economic and noneconomic) – beyond the theories developed in the literature – can detect new relations or optimal policies. This will lead to the formation of a complete set of AI-developed theories, or a significant revision in the “old pre-AI economics”. The question is, what will happen after that, when the community of ai economists replaces human economists? And how or whether it can be shaped?
The simplest application of AI economists would be to take on the main tasks that human economists carry out – providing economic advice or answering economic questions. Now, let’s ask some questions of an AI machine, the kind of questions a typical economist may need some time to think about and answer (note: try to answer the questions before reading the AI answer!). The answers are generated using OpenAI’s GPT-3 – the most advanced AI transformer developed so far, which I had access to for the test and exercise purposes:
AI: A lot depends on whether the private sector feels that the unconventional monetary policies are working. The aim of QE is to reduce the cost of credit. Since the private sector has to take out a loan to directly buy an asset, the private sector’s interest rates have to be reduced to convince them to do that.
AI: There is no such thing as a shortcut. Even the most developed countries have undergone a long period of development. As China has been pursuing economic development for nearly three decades and taken one step at a time, it can be said that development is always a long-drawn-out process.
Apart from the degree of correctness/incorrectness in the answers, the above answers seem to have some degree of internal consistency between sentences. Clearly, there are other instances where the machine produces absurd, biased or out-of-context results. Let’s read the following question and answer:
AI: Alas, the question is not clear. For if to be given money is a right, then the right must be universal.
