We talk about artificial intelligence today in the same way we talked about railways in the 19th century or electricity in the early 20th century, but with a significant difference: We now anticipate the future before what exists. You may accuse me of repeating my previous thoughts, but the more I explore a concept I’m beginning to call “promise accounting,” the more I agree with the need not to base our judgments on financial expectations or cultural resignation manidas.
This is basically the promise accounting logic I propose: Remind yourself of the future benefits of the presentthereby bringing the balance of the system to an abundance not previously attained.
Economist Charles I. Jones, va paper Anyone who needs to read it calmly will assign numbers and models to this humble writer’s intuition. This thesis goes like this: even if artificial intelligence advances in a spectacular way, even if cognitive tasks are automated on a large scale, Economic growth cannot be expected immediately. And this is why the real economy is full of bottlenecks, weak points, complementary areas that limit the overall result. Artificial intelligence may be the greatest miracle of all time, but the production system remains a tool full of friction.
The first thing to remember: automating a task is not the same as freeing up the entire system. Jones explains this with his logic weak links: production is limited by what has not yet been automated. As long as the production in the segment is infinite, the rest of the process will be ready, ready, resistant to scaling. Embargo-free promise accounting usually works because each precise procedure was immediately structural as each new model rewrites the country’s PIB potential.
Economic history is dark: big technologies are slowly declining in full. Working with electricity, with an electric motor, with the Internet. All these technologies require additional ingredients, from corporate reorganization to this institutional change, passing through new forms of work and above all time. Artificial intelligence is no different in this sense, although its symbolic power is greater. The problem is that the financial, political and media system lives in the future, while the productive economy continues in the present. And there is a passage between the two of us that tells us a story in communication and social networks.
Alas, this is where accounting for the promise gets tricky. Not because a promise is false until it is received. Aval for justifying large inversions in infrastructures, aval for capital concentration, aval for loosening controls, aval for assuming systemic risks. Jones enters this terrain when faced with the existential challenge of artificial intelligence and leads to the conclusion that As great as the promise of future growth and happiness, the greater the risk we are willing to accept today. Future abundance works as a moral page, and if the morning is so great, it seems reasonable to invest in the present.
Are we talking about the debate that we are concerned about weaknesses in the financial system around AI? The promise doesn’t just inflate economic balances; also disarm ethical and regulatory resistance. If you assume that any brake is a missed opportunity, that any precautions – such as the AI Act – are over. The result is a path of inversion and computing power that no one wants to look forward to, although everyone suspects that the actual returns will be slower, more uniform, and more complete than what the dominant relationship is.
From this point of view artificial intelligence is not just creating an economy of abundance, but rather an economy of expectation. An economy in which current decisions remain in the context of unrealized future benefits, in which business decisions are confused with financial states, and in which a promise is transformed into a strategic asset. The risk is not that I will be disappointed until the system is sufficiently adjusted and ready for the future, which may come late or come in an asymmetrical form.
None of this is to deny the magnitude of what is at stake. As dear readers know, I am a firm believer in the transformative power of this technology and an avid user of it. And if AI often has a better impact than the Internet, as Jones suggests in Largo Plaza, the problem will not be technical but rather political, distributional and cultural.
But for this very reason it is better to stop counting on the promise as it was cultivated. Y, if you’ll allow me a piece of advice, start looking more carefully where there are weak links that are still irreducible and that bear the cost of the phase.
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