GEAB 199

EDITORIAL

We are feeling rather playful and upbeat this November. Perhaps it’s the word “fuzzy” that is putting us in such a good mood. You will find it at the heart of a long article on fuzzy finance, a paradigm we anticipate could emerge by 2030 in response to a growing crisis in financial risk under the influence of AI.

Indeed, AI models, designed to predict and optimise, are beginning to generate convergence of decisions, herd effects, collective excitement and ultimately systemic fragility. And this extends well beyond the financial world. But perhaps this is because we are misusing AI. Perhaps it is because we are applying it to the old paradigm of maximising everything (returns, growth). Perhaps the power of AI as a tool is accelerating instability, pushing the old model ever closer to its limits and to a breaking point. Perhaps it is forcing a profound change in the objectives and operating principles of our society.

If, instead of high optimisation, we ask it to serve the objectives of “stability, diversity and resilience”, and if we couple it with fuzzy logic that feeds on incomplete or imperfect data, in a word human data, then AI can become a self-regulating mechanism for complexity that does not eliminate chaos but keeps it within liveable limits. In short, human logic.

Fuzzy logic is already at work behind pattern recognition in robotics, road traffic management, air traffic management, medical diagnosis assistance, meteorology, and so on. But in finance, it still comes up against institutional regulatory frameworks (Basel III, Solvency II, etc.). In politics, it is the entire “old-school” democratic edifice that it challenges and that is increasingly being reinvented by the current wave of social movements, according to an article by our partner AADF – would this be a reinvention following the fuzzy logic?

As for global governance, could the Global Governance Initiative recently proposed by the Chinese (see our article on this subject) also be pointing us toward these paths to managing uncertainty?

As we know, the world is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA)… and therefore uncontrollable. But we have the tools (AI) and logic (fuzzy) allowing us to accept this state of affairs without wanting to change anything, to be satisfied with it and to find stability in it. In HR, companies are looking for diversity, even neurodiversity.

Of course, the multipolar world has inalienable characteristics of diversity. The multicultural model of diversity in our societies is spreading across the globe in response to the significant demographic crisis (even Japan is opening up to immigration !).

However, since we are all connected, must we all strive towards a human “identity” (in the sense of being identical) (and which one?) in order to be able to function together? Is this goal reasonable? What forms of totalitarianism might it lead to? Yet freedom is the ideal fuel for these machines…

Technologies will eventually be well understood and used. But at this stage, they are accelerating all crisis scenarios: financial, economic, political, environmental, etc.

Let us remember, however, the immense hopes that rocked our societies after the subprime crisis (decentralised society, flat model, monetary diversity, etc.) and let us hope that this second major moment of “global systemic crisis”, which is looming ever larger on our horizon, will truly lead us towards these new models.

As we will see in the first article, the current system is unsustainable in every way, so who would want the future it offers?

Marie-Hélène Caillol
Editor-in-Chief

To access the full issue, please log in or register here