Argentina’s AI chief executives are a scary thought. But will we notice any difference? – The Irish Times

Source Domain: www.irishtimes.com

It is a widely held belief among the Silicon Valley faithful that artificial intelligence will inevitably become so powerful and sophisticated that it will simply make sense to devolve power to machines. Humans are excellent and valuable in many ways, goes the thinking, but when it comes to rational decision making, and high-level logical calculations, we are, as a matter of strict definition, simply not going to be able to compete with the sort of superhuman intelligence the world’s largest technology companies are currently vying with each other to create.

The idea of a world run by machines might seem far fetched, but only until you think about it. Take, for instance, the stock market, that engine room of global capitalism: although most of the big high-level choices – macroeconomic risk assessments, portfolio parameters and so on – are still what they call human-in-the-loop processes, the majority of actual buying and selling decisions are made by AI and automated algorithms. Some of the most ambitious and highlyresourced people in the world are working to build a future in which decisions of any consequence are made by AI; this is a future, they believe, that is coming whether we like or not.

Last week the Argentinian president, Javier Milei, published an op-ed in the Financial Times in which he cemented his status as a sort of political figurehead of the Silicon Valley AI accelerationists. In the article, Milei signalled his intention to take his trademark chainsaw to any and all forms of AI regulation, making Argentina the first country in the world to allow companies to be run entirely by AI, without humans in the loop. In order to facilitate this, he wrote, he would be overseeing the creation of a new corporate category in Argentinian law: “the non-human corporation”.

“These are entities operated by AI agents or robots,” Milei wrote. Where these systems exercise independent judgment in unpredictable environments – as they must, if they…

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