Das Adam Smith ChatGPT Problem

Nota bene: Below is an excerpt from the antepenultimate chapter (Ch. 11) of my forthcoming book with Salim Rashid, Das Adam Smith Problematic? Ethics, Economics and Society. (Footnotes are below the fold. Also, while we’re on the subject of artificial intelligence, check out the following essay by our colleague Brendan McCord: “Would Adam Smith Trust ChatGPT?“) “Were he alive today, what would Adam Smith have to say about the introduction of powerful new ‘large language models’ like ChatGPT? Would he, for example, decry ChatGPT’s potential negative impacts on our ability to think and write for ourselves, or would he maybe liken ChatGPT to the great Encyclopédie, the most ambitious intellectual project of the Age of Enlightenment, the first methodical endeavor to assemble the entire corpus of human knowledge?[1] “Alas, it’s hard to say, for as we already saw in a previous chapter (Ch. 3), we see this very same tension in Smith’s analysis of the division of labor in The Wealth of…