The contextualizing of capitalism, free markets and innovations has been with us since the dawn of capitalism. What are we to make of the tulip mania in Holland or the South Sea Bubble in London? Or worse, the Mississippi Bubble (1718–1720), a massive 18th century financial crisis in France caused by the rapid inflation and subsequent collapse of shares in the Compagnie des Indes, managed by John Law?
Driven by speculative investments in French Louisiana, share prices soared from 500 to 18,000 livres before crashing, ruining many investors and causing severe economic damage. Some have thought that the collapse of the company’s stock wiped out the new, precarious, rising middle class in France, which contributed to the extremisms of the French Revolution.
Outcomes are realities which can be scrutinized from moral perspectives.
AI is now creating new realities. What moral compasses are needed to frame our appreciation of AI? What modalities are needed to impose that frame on the practices, production processes and products of AI?
In a recent piece for The Economist, Shuwei Fang of Harvard writes of AI from this perspective:
The conversation about AI and the information economy is mostly about supply. Content is being commoditized. Journalism is dying. Intellectual property is being scraped without consent or compensation. The internet is being flooded with misinformation and slop. …
What’s missing here is that AI’s impact on the information ecosystem is also a demand-side shock and arguably, a demand-side expansion.
Every major information revolution, from printing to mobile, expanded the market for knowledge, often dramatically. AI is likely to do the same, but is also categorically different: the world is entering the age of machine audiences. …
Consider what happens when someone asks an AI a question about the world. The system draws on vast amounts of knowledge and other content, synthesizes what it deems relevant and gives an answer shaped to serve that person’s intentions. That answer is entirely new and may never be seen again. …
But AI does not only create machine demand. It simultaneously expands human demand too. The obscure corners of information demand – very specific needs that no article or broadcast could ever serve before – become addressable. Conversational AI brings latent demand to the surface too, helping people articulate needs they could not previously express. And AI lowers cognitive barriers: complex information, once comprehensible only to specialists, becomes digestible by anyone who can ask a question. …
This market has barely begun to form. There are no stable mechanisms to match and price the demand signal against the supply that could serve it. The information supply chain that could run from how knowledge is sourced, through how agents exchange it, to how AI delivers comprehension to humans, has no common rails and no incentive structure to reward rigor over fluency. …
The disciplines that journalism and the scientific method developed over centuries – of truth-seeking, accountability and self-correction – are the very operating principles that market will require.