Age of AI holds both promise and peril

This year has been dominated by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), which is becoming the latest field of struggle for leadership between the United States and China. Laymen such as myself dabble in using different models, such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, Perplexity and Qwen. Other than doing basic research and helping to collate larger data sets to extract new insights, how is AI transforming the economy, finance and society as a whole?

I have always been somewhat sceptical of futurologists. It’s not wrong to think about the future because we look to history to try and explain the present, projecting incomplete trends into the future. However, reality is the result of the interaction of so many complex factors that seemingly random events, which Nassim Nicholas Taleb termed “black swans”, can throw our best projections into the rubbish heap of failed theories. There is now a widely shared belief that technology is the solution to all our problems, but every solution brings new problems and challenges.