Originally published July 2023.

The professional classes are currently, and rightly, obsessing about the impact that AI will have on the service sector as ChatGPT gets exponentially smarter. The current iteration of ChatGPT – the most popular AI – is said to have an IQ equivalent of around 155, meaning that the next one will, quite literally, be the “cleverest” thing in history.

Mark Twain once said about risk that “the thing that kills you isn’t what you don’t know, but the thing that you know to be absolutely true but turns out not to be so.” Are we ready, then, for if AI tells us things we know to be true are not quite so?

Think of the three so-called certainties that have driven western economies to the brink of disaster in recent years – what I refer to as the triple zeroes; Zero Interest Rates, Zero Carbon and Zero Covid. All three were globalist policies presented by the white-collar classes as the only option to solve an imminent problem that they had determined based on – rather basic – computer-modelling. None of the three have ever been in a political manifesto, none have ever been subject to cost-benefit analysis, and none have been allowed any challenge, either to the thesis or to the models – which all incidentally fail the scientific method and all fail to match real world outcomes. The fact that the policies have all largely benefitted the 1% rather than the 99% is consistent with Charlie Munger’s observation “show me the incentive and I will show you the behaviour.” However, this is less about self-interest being the driver of the policy than it is about why the white-collar classes will resist any challenge.