The AI Awakening

Full disclosure: This issue of Finance & Development was produced entirely with human intelligence. But someday soon at least parts of this magazine may be assisted by artificial intelligence—a topic that has dominated global discourse since ChatGPT’s introduction one year ago.

Generative AI has introduced tantalizing new possibilities in both the public and private spheres. Think how these “machines of the mind” can improve health care diagnoses, close education gaps, tackle food insecurity with more efficient farming, drive planetary exploration—not to mention eliminate the drudgery of work.

Yet the initial excitement surrounding AI has given way to genuine and growing concerns—including about the spread of misinformation that disrupts democracy and destabilizes economies, threats to jobs across the skills spectrum, a widening of the gulf separating the haves and have-nots, and the proliferation of biases, both human and computational.

This issue is an early attempt to understand AI’s implications for growth, jobs, inequality, and finance. We bring together leading thinkers to explore how to prepare for an AI world.

In our lead article, Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Gabriel Unger sketch two wildly different potential outcomes (beneficial or detrimental) for AI’s effect on each of three important facets of the economy—productivity growth, income inequality, and industrial concentration (the collective market share of the largest firms in a sector). The future that emerges will be a consequence of many things, including technological and policy decisions made today, they note.

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