the wisdom of the crowds (12. 362)

A bit of social media sleuthing and reverse engineering suggests that the Trump administration contrived its nonsensical tariff formula by asking AI and set those custom rates per the confident suggestion of a chatbot, which are not reciprocal to import duties at all but rather their trade surplus divided by total exports. Economist and frequent financial contributor to The New Yorker and other publications James Surowiecki obtained similar solutions when prompting various AI models with the question “how to fix trade imbalance.” We suspected that infusing artificial intelligence into everything and the attendant slop produced eventually would drive us collectively over a cliff but wasn’t suspecting such a mark, like a kid rushing to get an overdue homework assignment completed, would be its agent, native and wilful ignorance, shortcuts and retribution conspiring to further fray the global supply chain whose brittleness was on display not too long ago during the pandemic and unleash havoc on world markets and international relations.