The Impossibility of Automating Economic Flourishing
What if the real engine of economic prosperity isn’t finding the right answers, but the very human act of asking questions no one has thought to ask yet? In a recent piece in Stanford Social Innovation Review, SWAI’s Jukka Luoma, together with Lauri Pietinalho and Matt Statler, debate this question in the context of of AI’s growing role in innovation and value creation. Authors argue, that genuine innovation — and the human flourishing that comes with it — cannot be automated, because it depends not on pattern recognition but on the distinctly human capacity to venture into the unknown and create things whose value cannot be known in advance. The reasoning leads to questioning what winning in the AI race genuinely means. “Ultimately, the winning economies in the AI age won’t be those driven by fear of falling behind or by blind deployment, but those that are able to maintain humans at the helm throughout the fabric of business and society. Otherwise, there will be no one actually doing the winning,” the authors conclude.