Institutional impact of AI

Interesting take on the institutional impact of AI by Will Rinehart:

A lot of people are likening the advent of AI to moveable type. The printing press brought about the conditions for the Reformation, therefore significant institutional change is coming with AI. But when you look at how print changed cultures other than Europe, the picture gets muddied. In China, the “bureaucratic authority absorbed the technological impacts of printing to enforce cultural and social coherence.”

Rather than serving as a catalyst for institutional change, print was used to support Chinese Imperial authority and maintain stability in the Song Dynasty. While AI has the potential to disrupt and reshape institutions, the extent of that change will vary across different countries and cultures. Government policies, economic systems, social norms, and cultural values will all influence how AI is developed, regulated, and integrated into various domains of life.

An interesting edge case to consider is social media. Social media helped to bring about the Arab Spring but did it have the same destabilizing effect in the West? Sure, it did exacerbate political division here in the US but those fissures were already trending poorly beforehand. Meanwhile in Northern Europe, political divisions seem to have hardly budged. Denmark, and Finland consistently rank among the most stable and least politically divided nations in the world, despite high social media usage.

In other words, AI’s impact on institutions will depend heavily on the specific historical, political, and cultural contexts in which these technologies are introduced and adopted.