Dystopian future: The brave new world according to the world’s economic elite
Needless to say, this can be used by the totalitarians against us. “I think, ‘Wow, we can do that?’ And then I think, ‘Oh God, they can do that,‘” said FBI director Christopher Wray.
Wray said China’s drive for global dominance of AI is “built on top of massive troves of intellectual property and sensitive data that they’ve stolen over the years”, and that is not subject to democratic constraints.
“That’s something we’re deeply concerned about, and I think everyone here should be deeply concerned about,” he said in Davos.
Tech billionaire Thomas Siebel, now pioneering artificial intelligence at C3.ai, told a tech panel that elastic cloud computing is allowing us to do extraordinary things, with dystopian consequences if we are not careful.
“Much of the population will be wearing – or have embedded – devices that report on pulse, blood chemistry, gut chemistry, or brain waves. It is within our grasp today. We can predict with very high levels of precision who is going to be diagnosed with what disease. We will know who is going to die from a terminal illness in the next three years,” he added.
On the global economy, I learnt that the Davos fraternity overwhelmingly believes in a soft landing and a painless immaculate disinflation. “The complacency this year is stunning,” said Harvard professor Ken Rogoff, an expert on debt cycles and a former US chess grandmaster, accustomed to looking more that one move ahead.
One thing I have learnt from going to Davos for almost two decades is to mistrust snapshot consensus.
The optimism has not reached the surreal levels of January 2008, which must go down in history as the acme of financial self-delusion, but it is strangely blind to obvious dangers.
There is always a narrative that you can latch on to. At this WEF it was the return of China. Vice-premier Liu He, economic plenipotentiary of the Communist Party, came to reassure the business elites the neo-Maoist purge is over and wolf warriors’ diplomacy is giving way to diplomatic detente. “All-round opening up is the basis of state policy. China’s national reality dictates that opening up to the world is a must. We must open up wider and make it work better,” he said.
It was a serenade. There was not a single word of criticism of the West, or the US. While one can take a hard-bitten view of this charm offensive, China’s dash for growth after a three-year drought is real. The question is whether an increasingly “Japanised” China is still capable of roaring growth, and whether this is enough to offset the monetary squeeze and fiscal austerity in the West.
Meanwhile, groupthink is now ignoring the clear forewarning of a disinflationary crunch. You would not have known in Davos that the real money aggregates are contracting with varying degrees of intensity in the US, the UK, and the eurozone. The Davosians are betting that the central banks will get the calibration right and step back with perfect timing.
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Hmm. The European Central Bank’s Christine Lagarde was there breathing fire. “Inflation is way too high,” she said. Former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers repeated his calls for a scorched-earth monetary policy. If there were voices at the WEF making the counter-case that central banks have already done enough tightening, and that they ought to stop before inflicting grave damage, I did not hear them. Perhaps they are right.
But one thing I have learnt from going to Davos for almost two decades is to mistrust snapshot consensus.
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