Macroscope | Why fear AI when it can flag up biased, contradictory policies ruining the world?
- Politicians and policymakers around the world have reason to be concerned over the rise of AI that can analyse their actions and point out their many flaws
- While AI-driven analysis itself would not be a guarantee of policy reform, it would at least provide alerts of potentially contradictory aims
National leaders, politicians or strategic and economic policymakers have real grounds for such fears. Feed into a powerful computer the multiple and conflicting policy analyses and aims of different camps and countries and the machine might warn that these add up to disaster, or at least confusion.
Take for example the bellicose attitudes characterising US-China and US-Russia relations nowadays and set it alongside the commitment to “sustainability” that is bandied around freely by leaders. An objective AI would demand to know how such aims of war and peace can be reconciled.
Take also the idea that globalisation can be restored to a world which is at war with itself through the formation of rival economic and strategic blocs. AI would point out that this is a fundamental contradiction and that the result must inevitably be loss of efficiency and inflation, or worse.
At a more day-to-day level, recent assessments of Asia’s economic prospects have revealed divergent views that AI-driven analysis might have challenged. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund have tended towards pessimism while the Asian Development Bank has, somewhat confusingly, been more optimistic.