What Markets Can Teach Us About Artificial Intelligence: Essay

Imagine a system that takes in billions of data points, conducts a massive number of simple but opaque operations, and then spits out responses that are both useful and, sometimes, destructive. The system seems all-knowing, but it is reductive and lacks common sense. We allow it to make major decisions, although a chorus of critics worries that it doesn’t share our values and may prove impossible to control. The system is not a large language model like ChatGPT. It’s the US stock market.

This is the sort of metaphor that a small but influential group of social and cognitive scientists ...