WE NOW live in a FinTech (financial technology) world. Most Filipinos experience it through GCash and online payment rails, but it goes further than that through smart contracts, data security, digital tokens, online banking and more.
And thanks to artificial intelligence, (AI), the world five or 10 years from now, may be even stranger.
Consider websites, like Amazon or Shopee. You go through the usual processes – you set up an account, shop through the product lists, purchase an item and choose your payment methods.
Now, consider if that website suddenly had an AI, one that could handle all your purchases for you. You just tell them what you need, they present candidates to you and they will make the purchase once you have confirmed the transaction. The entire process is now compressed.
Now, let’s take it one step further. What if you could give your monthly bills, taxes, subscriptions, income receipts to an AI?
What if you’re a business owner and you could rely on an agent to handle invoicing, accounting, marketing leads, etc.?
What if you’re a city official, and you have the option to do the same with your city assets?
You will still have to verify the final outcome, but the culmination of this trend is that most transactions work will be handled by machines, with humans positioned in the chokepoints.
And this is already happening, not in the Philippines, but in countries that have embraced automation. Eventually, I believe that it will arrive here as well, though how well it is integrated with the larger economy is anyone’s guess at this point.
What is important to mention, though, is that an AI-based economy will look like a post-scarcity economy provided the energy and supply chains hold. All this abundance will come at the cost of financial sovereignty in that most of the assets that control this production will be concentrated on a few owners, while the rest live in abundance but with little agency in the economic trajectory of their societies.
Transactions, production and even consumption to an extent will be managed by AI and that system will look more productive than the old friction-heavy human controlled systems. We already see the result in FinTech, but it will come with a price: economic bargaining power.
There is no such thing as a free lunch./PN
