Janez Žibert

The main victim of artificial intelligence will be the European Union. AI rewards exactly what Europe has spent the last thirty years suppressing: speed, risk-taking, scale, cheap energy, capital concentration, aggressive investment, tolerance for failure and the ability to make decisions before five committees, twelve regulators and twenty-seven governments have finished discussing them. The United States will build the models. China will build the infrastructure. The Gulf will finance whatever it wants. Smaller states will move quickly because they still understand that technology is something you deploy before regulating it to death. The EU will produce impact assessments. And this time, regulation will not merely make Europeans slightly poorer or slightly less competitive. AI is a general-purpose technology capable of replacing enormous quantities of administrative, legal, analytical and bureaucratic labour — precisely the sectors in which Europe has accumulated much of its economic weight. The EU has built an economy increasingly dependent on regulation, credentialism, compliance, paperwork and expensive human intermediation. AI attacks all of them at once. The irony is almost perfect: the political system most obsessed with regulating artificial intelligence may be the political system whose economic model artificial intelligence makes obsolete. Europe risks spending the AI revolution doing what it does best: writing rules for industries that will eventually exist somewhere else.