Peter Morici: Computers will make mischief once they learn to talk, listen and reason

Personal assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and generative artificial intelligence tools now appearing at work can amuse, streamline tasks and leverage productivity by gathering and organizing information, drafting documents and performing time-consuming tasks.

But they can’t yet duplicate the prescience or situational awareness humans possess by virtue of our rearing, education, personal and professional experience and still superior sensory capabilities.

By the end of this decade, however, AI agents will be able to communicate with us in conversational English and one another to make decisions, take actions, negotiate on our behalf, achieve goals and, if we allow it, order our lives.

By observing our interactions through electronic devices and conversations with others, they will learn our likes and dislikes, financial circumstances and the expectations of clients and employers.

Agents could learn your preferences in dress and relationships, physical attributes, risk tolerance and values you wish to impart to your children.

Then it could shop for clothes and get them altered, use a dating app to meet someone — and assess that person’s interests and create an itinerary. Or manage your investment portfolio and monitor your child’s school progress and interact with teachers — or their agents.

In government and business, AI agents have enormous safety and cost-saving possibilities.

The autonomous drive tools and “vehicle-to-everything technology,” which will permit vehicles to interact with one another and infrastructure such as traffic signals, cameras and computers processing their observations, could prevent driving errors.

A dramatic reduction in crashes, injuries and deaths and a downward spiral of auto repair bills, vehicle replacement costs and insurance premiums should follow.

Agents can greatly assist the management of electric utilities — the allocation of power from generating stations, load management and grid maintenance.

In medicine, they should be able to read X-rays, lab results and patient monitors and correlate them with vast datasets of clinical experiences to optimize therapies quickly. They might perform some surgeries with superior precision and dexterity.

Customer service phone bots that ask yes-or-no questions to move through decision trees may be replaced by conversational agents that are less tedious and handle a broader range of issues.

BlackRock’s widely used Aladdin portfolio management platform helps asset managers assess risks and weigh choices. But advanced AI agents trained on similar data could likely make better buying decisions.

Federal regulators are concerned about asset managers trading with the same information potentially herding and setting off crashes. With current protocols, Aladdin informs, but asset managers make independent purchase decisions.

AI agents trained on the same data and trading could alter that. Morgan Stanley trains its generative AI tool only on its own intellectual capital, so such limits would handicap such tools against those trained on wider information.

With approaching prescience apparently comes a form of free will that is just as corruptible as in humans. Just like employees, AI agents given full latitude to maxim­ize publicly available know­ledge can’t be policed 100%.

The potential legal liabilities when AI agents are allowed to act on behalf of humans may be limitless.