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Perhaps the most unique characteristic of humans is our boundless inventiveness.
Reading the transcript of Blake Lemoine’s “interview” with LaMDA, Google’s remarkable and possibly sentient AI, makes that perfectly clear, but also highlights how this kind of ingenuity may push the boundaries of our current ability to predict the impact and ultimately the costs of such creativity.
Whether or not LaMDA is truly sentient, reading this exchange got me thinking (as a software engineering consultant…my day job) about the great ways in which a service like LaMDA could be leveraged within existing software application domains, and even how the role of the user within such applications could be redefined.
More specifically, as services that can generate real, unique intelligence and insights on demand (data analytics, protocols, policies, art, culture, etc.) are built into functional software applications, users began to wonder where they fit into this equation.
In a sense, we already delegate our raw math and computation needs to magical microprocessors that are far more capable (almost magically) than we are of performing such tasks. What will be left for humans to do when we can delegate our intelligence just as easily?
My guess is that we, the humans, will become more willing to do the one thing we've always been good at: inventing and reinventing things.
But whether in academia or philosophy, industrialization or finance, or pure hard science and technology, our inventiveness has typically been accompanied by massive overshoots, resulting in rapid growth accompanied by natural disasters, and new ways of operating have led to massive bursts of “creative destruction” that have continually disrupted the outdated present.
Nowhere is this “two steps forward, one step back” pattern more evident than in the fields of finance and economics.
As I have pointed out before, we have become so adept at manipulating financial affairs that we routinely exceed the limits of prudent and sensible financial conduct and use the tools of financial ingenuity for irresponsible purposes.
The financial ingenuity of the past few decades has produced a highly abstracted, structured, securitized, digitized, and marketized financial system that has allowed for a massive expansion of general debt and, when economic conditions become bad enough, has allowed the Federal Reserve, with its supposedly unlimited access to the new monetary base, to engage in direct “open market operations” as lender/buyer of last resort to bail out the entire economic system.
The idea that central banks could essentially fund large parts of a previously functioning market (mortgage-backed securities) or nation (Treasury bonds) in the midst of a historic and painful financial crisis was not just ambitious, it was downright reckless.
But reality ultimately imposes itself on all human ingenuity, and in so doing reminds us of the fundamental “real world” parameters to which we are all ultimately bound in the long run and by which we have no choice but to conform.
Our current realization of this harsh reality for the economy seems to unfold with each passing day.
The Federal Reserve and the Federal Government chose to leverage the health of the financial system to bail out and boost the Great Recession of 2008. This further established a precedent for the continued use of similar techniques ever since, eventually resulting in a spectacular second incarnation of this approach once the COVID pandemic panic hit.
Now, with real evidence of runaway monetary inflation and a sudden shift to a new policy regime, the Fed faces the challenge of fulfilling its core mission and is forced into a long, and likely very painful, struggle to restore credibility and thus some of the integrity of a system that has been squandered.
As this defeat continues, one cannot help but wonder what the world will be like in two to five years, after a major “step back” has reconnected our dreamy, inventive human sensibilities with the fundamental limitations of cold, hard reality.