Artificial intelligence (AI), automation powered by AI, advanced algorithms, and other emerging technologies are changing the landscape of the global financial services industry, including in the United States. AI offers numerous benefits to financial companies seeking to lower costs and provide speedier decisions for consumers and other businesses, but it also comes with significant threats to liberty.
There is a growing movement throughout the West to manipulate the design of artificial intelligence systems to advance various social and economic goals favored by progressive institutions and some governments. They can accomplish this task by ensuring that AI systems favor, disfavor, or exclude certain information, or by changing data before using it to train an AI system. In many cases, activists claim such a strategy is necessary to ensure that humans survive climate change and effectively combat alleged systemic social and economic biases, especially those related to race. In reality, however, these efforts only increase bias and injustice, and they have very little, if any, effect on global warming.
This troubling development means that institutions that rely on AI and advanced algorithms, including financial services companies, run the risk of introducing the biases of designers and activists into their services. In some cases, this could put them at odds with existing regulations that mandate fair treatment of consumers and businesses
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Justin Haskins is the director of the Socialism Research Center and editorial director at The Heartland Institute.
