Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.
Editor:
You report that Bill Gates “issued a stark warning about AI’s risks to employment and the human condition” (“Three Takeaways From Bill Gates’s 5,784-Word Warning on AI: ‘There Is No Plan’,” August 26). He complains about AI that “we are not preparing for it,” for he doesn’t “see evidence that leaders, experts and communities are confronting the challenges adequately.” And to slow the adoption of AI, Mr. Gates wants to tax AI tokens and bots.
A far more appropriate warning is against the hubris of Mr. Gates. Because he personally cannot imagine how people free of government coercion will creatively experiment and discover ways of dealing with economic change brought on by AI, he arrogantly presumes that such experimentation and discovery won’t occur. His poor imagination combines with his apparent ignorance of economic history – a history replete with examples of individuals in free societies anticipating challenges and meeting these in ways that politicians and bureaucrats could not possibly match – to cause him to embrace the ‘solution’ beloved by autocrats and tyrants: collective manipulation and management of the economy.
Almost all of what the late Nobel laureate Oliver Williamson called “the economic institutions of capitalism”* emerged through decentralized processes of trial and error in competitive markets – venues in which free individuals, with local knowledge, cooperate with each other to confront problems with nuance, fullness, and creativity that are utterly unattainable by the heavy hand of the state.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030* Oliver E. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (New York: The Free Press, 1985).
