At Jackson Hole, global central bankers glimpse dystopian AI future
At Jackson Hole, global central bankers glimpse dystopian AI future
摘要: At Jackson Hole, global central bankers glimpse dystopian AI future
By Ann Saphir
Mon, August 31, 2026 at 7:37 PM GMT+9
4 min read
By Ann Saphir
正文
At Jackson Hole, global central bankers glimpse dystopian AI future
By Ann Saphir
Mon, August 31, 2026 at 7:37 PM GMT+9
4 min read
By Ann Saphir
JACKSON HOLE, Wyoming, Aug 31 (Reuters) - Imagine a world where AI-powered trading is so prevalent, fast and effective that the Federal Reserve must give two news conferences, one for humans and another for machines, to avoid humans being completely shut out of responding to shifts in monetary policy.
Or where central bankers, who in recent decades have moved toward more transparency, must speak in opaque terms and act in unpredictable ways to keep AI agents from gaming the system.
Or where monetary policymakers must intervene directly in credit markets and build larger central bank balance sheets -- both ideas antithetical to the preferences of Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh and many of his counterparts -- to avoid the risk of AI-driven market manipulation.
Those were just a few of the dystopian scenarios that Princeton University economist Markus Brunnermeier laid out to global central bankers on Saturday in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in what amounted to a plea for urgent action to prepare for and counter what he predicts could be sweeping disruption from the adoption of artificial intelligence in the financial world.
It was one of the final presentations at the Kansas City Fed's annual economic symposium, where far more immediate concerns like the market fallout from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's government debt buybacks and Warsh's notable shift to a franker style of policy communication dominated much of the conversation.
And it put a fresh market-focused lens on the potential implications of AI for central bankers, who have tended to focus on how the technology may change labor markets, enhance productivity, reduce inflation, or all three and more.
In Brunnermeier's telling, AI is so much better at processing information than humans that it will soon have the advantage of knowing with near certainty what c