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Could AI manage the economy better than politicians?
Congress has a job approval of 18%. It’s a low bar for algorithms
The idea that the work of our elected representatives could be done better by a computer program would strike most sensible people as absurd. Managing the economy and all of its moving parts, for instance, is a herculean task for any government. Balancing the implementation of new policies with keeping a steady hand on the tiller is no easy feat, even with a legion of civil servants standing by to shower decision-makers with memos and white papers.
On the other hand, just a few years ago, the idea that a computer program (an AI) could write poetry was absurd. Now, AI can write poetry good enough to fool reputable judges into thinking it must have been written by a human. You can add cancer diagnosis, theoretical mechanics and professional poker to the list of surprising areas where AI performance can surpass the humble homo sapien. A new initiative from Salesforce, an American software company, aims to add ‘economic policy’ to that list.
Stephen Zhang, the head of the ‘AI Economist’ research program, says that typical economic models relied on by economists and politicians suffer from serious challenges. To enable a controllable mathematical analysis, the models rely on assumptions. They might…
