| | Monetary policy, government power, and the market Mixing politics and monetary policy is a dangerous game—and often the only winner is the market itself. Bloomberg's Piotr Skolimowski has been following the ongoing saga of Poland's central bank governor, Adam Glapinski, who recently slashed interest rates in what critics call a bid to boost the ruling party's chances in next month's elections. Instead, the move spooked the market, prompting a huge selloff that devalued Poland's zloty. As Skolimowski notes, the situation in Poland echoes recent turmoil in Turkey and the UK, where similar policies meant to stimulate national economies (and perhaps buoy political futures) backfired when investors grew concerned about the stability of public finances. While instructive about the hazards of deploying monetary policy for political gain, these crises have a more significant implication: even government power is now subservient to "the market." This is a problem. Early proponents of the market economy argued that it would be kinder to people than the whims of princes, as Albert O. Hirschman so beautifully documented in The Passions and the Interests . But today, “the market” might well be the first rogue AI, putting its prime objective (financial profit) over all other human interests. As markets become increasingly automated, this becomes more than a metaphor. (I explored this topic back in 2017 in WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, and more recently in “The Alignment Problem Is Not New.”) + ICYMI: Check out "Our Skynet Moment," my talk from the 2017 O'Reilly AI Conference, for a brief introduction to the algorithms that shape our economy. | | | | | A new tool for comprehensive AI regulation One of the important ideas in Jennifer Pahlka’s book Recoding America , which we reviewed back in June, is that the complexity of government technology is a consequence of the underlying policy, comprised as it is of archeological layers of legislation and regulation, often poorly reconciled, as legislators and regulators pile policy on top of policy without ever going back and rewriting it all from scratch. So it was refreshing to see this note in Alex Engler’s proposal for “a new regulatory designation, applied though the US federal rulemaking process, which would lead to legally binding rules for a specific type of algorithm,” which he calls the Critical Algorithmic System Classification: To be blunt, I do not believe it is the best possible intervention for the problem described here, and neither did most of the many AI experts I consulted with when drafting this proposal. The best idea is to systematically update each of our civil rights and consumer protection laws to confront the digital and algorithmic age. From a strict policy perspective, that's the better approach. Yet, seeing that the systemic updating of most legal protections would be a politically challenging and fraught endeavor in the U.S., the CASC approach may function as a workable and effective alternative. + You can read Engler’s full proposal here. (Disclosure: Jen Pahlka is married to O'Reilly founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly.) | | | | | From the archives: "We Must Find a Grand Purpose for AI" Six years ago, I sat down with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella for a conversation on "defin[ing] the grand, inspiring social purpose for which AI is destined." Our wide-ranging conversation covered many of the critical areas companies (and governments ) are still laser-focused on today—from AI art to creating empowering technology to accountability—as we imagined how "to build a world in which AI reinforces and augments human capability and experience rather than devaluing it." Considering the current proliferation of AI tools, achieving this goal has only grown more consequential. But as Nadella insightfully pointed out in our chat, in a world with an abundance of artificial intelligence, "real intelligence [will be found in] the most human of qualities, which are empathy, and compassion, and those will be the most important things. Until we truly, truly figure out how to embed that into some machines, we will have to amplify that with [and for] humans." For now, the grand purpose of AI has yet to be determined, but it's a discussion well worth revisiting. + From CNBC: "Microsoft CEO Nadella Talks Concerns Around AI and Its Impact on Jobs, Education." | | | | | | —Tim O’Reilly and Peyton Joyce | | | |
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