Eswar Prasad

Digital currencies in many low-income economies have given, you know, even street vendors easy access to digital payments, banking services for managing their credit, savings risk, and so on.

So this is all wonderful.

The fear I have, though, is that the dark side of technology, and I have one particular vision of the dark side as playing a pretty big role, which is that we are seeing increasing concentration of economic assets

and financial power within countries and between countries.

You know, take AI.

It is making all of our lives a little more efficient.

But if you think about those whose jobs are most at risk, it is personally those who are at the front lines in terms of providing some types of service sector employment, for instance.

Across countries, we see a very similar phenomenon.

At Davos, I had a couple of meetings with African entrepreneurs who were super excited about how the new technology would increase their productivity, allow them to compete with other manufacturers at the world level, both in terms of goods production, but also in terms of services.

But when the conversation turned to employment, it was a very different story.

The sense that they would be able to do a lot more with these new tools,

while at the same time employing fewer workers, I think was a constant refrain.

And I fear that something similar might happen in the US, that we see many of the benefits of AI, even some of the open source AI that in principle everybody has access to.

On net, it might create some new jobs, there might be some jobs lost, but again, the overall benefits might end up becoming much more concentrated, which again feeds into the doom loop dynamics.

That's an extraordinarily difficult challenge because, again, we don't know exactly how the effects of AI will play out.

You know, when digital currencies came out with blockchain technologies, there was a sense that blockchain would completely transform financial services.

And it is playing a useful role, but it's not exactly transformed finance altogether.

AI

It seems like a much more powerful technology.

My fear, of course, is that we end up stifling innovation.