Economist-less economics: The future of economics in an AI-biased world by Tohid Atashbar published by World Economic Forum (8/2021).
“Sooner or later, AI-economist machines will replace human economists in many areas.
Unsupervised or reinforcement learning algorithms that can brute force the infinite set of relations and variables will revolutionise economics.
AI bias in economic policymaking can be reduced but will be unavoidable.
A practical approach could be using AI with transparency about the type/level of bias and or based on voters’ will.
Economists are not immune to automation. Going by the current trends in automated intelligence in economic modelling, sooner or later, technological unemployment will catch up with economists (with different levels of impact). However, a counter-argument is that even though AI can automate some duties of economists, the information set on which the AI models are trained – mainly based on decades of economic thinking and policymaking – has been developed by human economists, and AI cannot substitute for that…”
