Isaac Asimov, AI, and the Goals of Financial Regulation
Isaac Asimov, AI, and the Goals of Financial Regulation
https://www.bbva.com/en/economy-and-finance/isaac-asimov-ai-and-the-goals-of-financial-regulation/
Publish Date: 2026-06-16 01:59:00
Source Domain: www.bbva.com
To shed light on this debate, I propose the following exercise: imagine that financial regulation and supervision were entrusted to an artificial intelligence system and that its mandate had to be defined through an instruction or “prompt,” to use the technical term. One option would be to set a single objective: preserving financial stability. A second alternative would be to add a secondary mandate: preserving financial stability and, without prejudice to that objective, championing the competitiveness of the financial sector and its contribution to economic growth.
This second formulation closely resembles the objectives of monetary policy: under Article 2 of the ECB Statute, the ECB’s primary objective is to maintain price stability, but, without prejudice to that objective, it shall support the general economic policies of the Union.
The main argument for introducing a secondary objective is that European regulatory and supervisory agencies cannot disregard the competitiveness of the financial sector and of the wider European economy. In economics, situations involving multiple equilibria are common: when plotting two variables on a graph, it may be possible to achieve the same value for one variable with two or more different values for the other. In this case, let’s imagine that the same degree of financial stability could coexist either with a highly competitive economy or with a weakly competitive one. Under the “prompt” described in the first option, the AI system would draw no distinction between these two realities, which would be absurd.
To use another example, if we asked an AI system to set highway speed limits and told it that its objective was to prevent accidents, but said nothing about allowing people to get where they’re going within a reasonable amount of time, the speed limit would likely end up being set at an extremely low level — say, 10 kilometers per hour: maximum safety, zero efficiency.
Eighty…
