Introduction

In an economy where not only humans but also AI are involved, fundamental questions of governance arise: How can the economic process be governed when a computer is in the middle of every transaction and when machines show characteristics of social artifacts rather than of mechanical and electronic objects? What are the cornerstones of economic governance that ensure cooperation when humans and AI are at work? The technological, economic, and social developments of the recent past indicate why these questions are so relevant: “Software entities are more complex for their size than perhaps any other human construct” (Brooks, 1995, 182). This remark was made 12 years before the first iPhone was released in 2007, and even children began to hold a computational power in their hands that equaled those available to NASA's Apollo program, which ultimately achieved the first moon landing. One decade later, connected primarily via the Internet, there are more machines communicating with each other than humans. Varian (2014) observes that today computers are in the middle of virtually every transaction. And based on machine learning technologies, computers enter into a process of emancipation from their initial programmers. These highly dynamic developments mark the beginning of an era of AI. “This sort of intelligence is self-organizing, conversational, ever-adjusting, and dynamic. It is also largely autonomous. These conversations and their outcomes will take place with little or no human awareness or intervention” (Arthur, 2017, 5).

AI hits a global economy not only running but drastically accelerating in terms of complexity increase. Since the beginning of industrialization, GDP per head has been increasing exponentially. Diversification, specialization, and division of labor have continuously been on the rise. The global economyis a space of “cambiodiversity” (Koppl et al., 2015, 7), which is illustrated by the fact that over the last two decades, the number of products and services instantly accessible for consumers in the developed world has increased from tens of thousands in a large department store to hundreds of millions in online retailing today.

Already before the rise of AI, economists were consistently enquiring how one can successfully cope with the complexity of the economy. Last century, Walter Eucken asked “How is this process with its far-reaching division of labour controlled in its entirety, so that everyone comes by the good on which his existence depends?”