PERSON

Milton Friedman

The Nobel laureate economist who argued that no authority could hold the knowledge required to plan an economy—that prices carry more intelligence than any planner can gather—and whose framework of dispersed knowledge, no free lunch, and free to choose has become an indispensable instrument for diagnosing AI as a new candidate for the role he spent a lifetime warning against.

Milton Friedman is worth reading against artificial intelligence for a reason that has almost nothing to do with economics as the subject is usually taught. He is worth reading because he was, before anything else, a theorist of knowledge—specifically, of knowledge that no single person can hold. His most enduring arguments are not really about money or markets in the narrow sense; they are about the impossibility of central command in a world where the information needed to command is scattered across millions of minds, much of it never articulated, most of it changing faster than any authority can collect it. AI is the most serious technical claim ever made that the scattered knowledge can, in fact, be gathered, modeled, and acted upon from a center—that a sufficiently powerful model trained on sufficiently comprehensive

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