The Corbett Report community held a vigorous discussion on the future of Artificial Intelligence this past summer, and the results are in: No one understands the question (myself included). Now, to be fair, I didn’t do a very good job of framing the debate so, as is typical with this particular topic, it quickly became the standard AI argument about whether or not toasters have souls (“I toast therefore I am!”). I exaggerate only slightly.

I understand why the conversation inevitably steers in this direction. The nature of consciousness and the question of the soul are topics that have fascinated us as a species for thousands of years, and the advent of robotic consciousness threatens to upend the deeply-held beliefs of billions of people.

Perhaps inevitably, the prophets of the technological singularity have brought this issue directly to the fore by creating their own religion with “a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.” It’s called “Way of the Future” and was founded (with a large degree of MSM fanfare from the usual suspects) by…wait for it…an ex-Google engineer. That’s right, after developing our modern-day, real-life Big Brother‘s self-driving car, this Silicon Valley dropout has started a church for people to worship our coming robot overlords.

You can’t make this stuff up.

But, generally speaking, this is not the kind of thing that people researching in the field think about. So what do they think about? Oh, things like “What will the financial world be like when Skynet runs the markets?”

Think that sounds crazy? Well take that up with our good friends over at the shadowy Bank for International Settlements’ even shadowier little brother, the Financial Stability Board. They just published a white paper on that very subject.

Read about the FSB’s vision for our artificial intelligence-run economic future in this week’s subscriber editorial, and stick around for this month’s subscriber video where Vinnie Caggiano joins James for an in-depth breakdown of the musicality of The Beatles‘ “You Won’t See Me.”

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