I found Matt Seybold’s poetic essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books, “The End of Economics”, interesting, uniting, as it does, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and John Maynard Keynes. That sounds like the beginning of a joke but as it works out, as related in Woolf’s journal, the three were friends, at least to the extent that any of them could be a friend. The essay makes intriguing reading.
Artificial intelligence is much in the news these days and the term covers a lot of territory. It includes rules-based systems, natural language processing, and machine learning. Contrary to what’s suggested in Mr. Seybold’s article I don’t believe that its inherent contradictions, its lack of predictive power, or the irresistible temptation that economists face to pursue their own preferences and agendas over where the science leads them that will doom economics. I think that artificial intelligence will.
