Essay by E. Glen Weyl, James Evans and Chris White: “…Technology capable of enlarging human freedom, abundance and collective intelligence is being deployed into labor markets, public institutions and information systems that were already creaking before AI arrived. Left unaddressed, that mismatch produces three foreseeable failure modes.
- Productivity without prosperity. As the economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock and Chad Syverson illustrate in a 2021 article, general-purpose technologies create broad value only after heavy complementary investment in new processes, skills and organizational redesign. When those complements lag, work is reorganized faster than people can retrain, bargain or move, and the gains fail to translate into security, mobility or broader participation.
- Execution without verification. As the economists Christian Catalini, Xiang Hui and Jane Wu argue in a recent working paper, once the cost of producing text, images and code collapses, the scarce input becomes the human bandwidth to validate outputs, establish provenance and ensure accountability. Decisions grow easier to automate than to justify, and algorithmic systems without accountability erode sacred values and the social fabric.
- Capacity without constraint. AI can make states and large organizations far more capable, but as influential intellectuals and policy leaders in AI, Justin B. Bullock, Samuel Hammond and Sèb Krier note in a chapter published last year in “The Art of Digital Governance,” the same tools lower monitoring costs and concentrate discretion, pushing bureaucracies toward centralized control unless contestability, appeal and civil-liberties safeguards advance in tandem.
None of these is inevitable. Each is a consequence of institutional neglect, which raises the question of why some societies, in earlier periods of upheaval, adapted far more successfully than others…(More)”.
