Money and morals
Okay, look, I'm going to get a little moralistic here, but it's not my fault. It's kind of the whole story.
Artificial intelligence is changing, like, everything and it is changing it very fast. Over the weekend I wanted to see how easy it was to build a website with AI, and discovered it was extremely doable, even for somebody like me who is not a coder. Boston Consulting Group expects half of all jobs will be reshaped in some fashion by AI. Anthropic thinks virtually all jobs – 97% – could be sped up by using AI.
Of course these are all estimates, and you've probably seen ones even more histrionic. It's hard to know the future of course. But, what is not hard to know is that if all these AI-enhanced jobs are driven only by the goal of maximizing efficiency, we risk creating the next dystopia, a world of efficiency for efficiency's sake that leaves people and their needs somewhere out on the sidewalk.
Chana's focus on morals shouldn't be surprising. He is a member of the Global Alliance for Banking Values and a board member of Beneficial State Bank, which expressly markets itself as "ethical banking." He
Chana's concerns range from existing historical inequality being embedded in the new systems to the displacement of workers, especially workers who don't have the means to support themselves through such a change.
"I think we have a brief moment where the foundational architecture, both technical and moral, is still being written. I think the window is shorter than most leaders appreciate," he said. Chana's argument, which can be boiled down to saying we need to embed values in AI systems, reminded me of Harriet Martineau.
Who? Glad you asked. Martineau was the first great economics writer. Yes, Adam Smith is the father of economics, but most people don't read The Wealth of Nations; it's not exactly the most accessible work. But in the early 19th century, people did read Harriet Martineau, a London-based writer who penned a series of stories that highlighted various aspects of Smith's new theories about economics, and did it in a way that was accessible to the average reader.
She was, at the time, insanely popular. Martineau's work outsold Charles Dickens, no mean feat. And as she wrote more and more of these works, they took on a decidedly moralistic tone. Martineau argued that the real measure of an economic system was in how well it treated the least well-off in society. She was adamantly opposed to slavery, arguing against it both in moral and economic terms (she held that it was in total more expensive than just hiring workers), and in favor of women's rights, of educating women and emancipating them from their households and husbands.
Then a strange thing happened. The field we today know as economics developed away from Martineau's moral approach. It became more based on purported scientific methods (they don't call it the dismal science for nothing) and away from moral considerations. Martineau's work wasn't forgotten, but it morphed into a completely different field, which we today call sociology. She is known as a key figure in the field's development, but her contributions to economics have been largely forgotten.
It seems to me that what Chana is arguing for is largely a return to Martineau's approach to economics. "If we teach AI to reflect human and community values, it can become a powerful amplifier of financial inclusion," he wrote in March. What Chana is really advocating for is a return to an approach to money and economics that was extremely popular two centuries ago. With a new technology set to rewire our financial system, now would be a good time to revisit that approach.
Told ya I was gonna get a little moralistic.
Happy tax day!
If you haven't gotten your taxes done, stop reading this and go do them, because you've got only about 18 hours left. Me? Oh, I did my taxes months ago.
Yeah, I'm vaunting a bit, but only because I never get my taxes done early. Being a journalist, you can imagine I'm rather deadline-driven. It's not unusual for me to wait until the last minute, sometimes literally. I remember one year being in a post office that stayed open until midnight so people could have their returns post-marked by April 15. At least I'd brought my completed return to the post office; there were people there actually doing their taxes with less than an hour to go.
So I'm very sympathetic to the procrastinator set. Happy Tax Day.
