Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Computational Economists Any Time Soon?
Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Computational Economists Any Time Soon?
As firms invest heavily in AI and other technologies to help train data scientists, some economists worry they will find themselves redundant. But 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. Regardless of the reinforcement learning models, -unsupervised or using Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms – that can boundlessly search, iterate and artificially test the possible relations among the infinite set of variables (economic and noneconomic) – beyond the theories developed in the literature – can detect new relations or optimal policies. This will lead to the formation of a complete set of AI-developed theories, or a significant revision in the “old pre-AI economics”. The question is, what will happen after that, when the community of ai economists replaces human economists? And how or whether it can be shaped?
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