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 Nations, where he paints two opposing pictures of the division of labor, one of the central insights of his book. On the one hand, Smith describes the division of labor as not just one of the major causes of prosperity but as ‘the greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour ….’ in the very first sentence of The Wealth of Nations. (WN, I.i.1, our emphasis) But on the other hand, Smith paints a radically different picture of the division of labor in Book V of The Wealth of Nations. There, he explains why this very same division of labor gives rise to ‘stupidity and ignorance.’ (WN, V.x.c.24) By the same token, the same argument can be made against ChatGPT and other large language models. After all, these A.I. tools can write up a research article, translate a text, generate a blog post, narrate a story, or compose a poem. These models are so powerful that they can even program other computers. To conjure this A.I. genie out of her bottle and make her carry out any one of these tasks, all you need to do is type your command directly into your preferred chatbot or ‘A.I. assistant’ and wait a few seconds for her reply. Talk about a division of labor! No thinking required—just conjure up the genie.

“But at the same time, Adam Smith was also a huge fan of the famed Encyclopédie. In fact, the Scottish scholar had appreciated the significance of this ambitious work of erudition as early as 1756. In his letter to the authors of the Edinburgh Review of that same year, Smith (1980, p. 66) writes ‘it is with pleasure that I observe in the new French Encyclopedia, the ideas of Bacon, Boyle, and Newton, explained in that order, perspicuity and good judgement, which distinguish all the eminent writers of that nation.’ Smith not only extolled the great work of Diderot and d’Alembert in his 1756 letter; he also used his influence at the University of Glasgow to acquire the first seven volumes of the Encyclopédie.[2] These volumes were a costly acquisition at the time, taking up nearly a third of the library’s budget.[3] Just as the Encyclopédie was a symbol of the Age of Enlightenment, has the ChatGPT genie become, for better or worse, a symbol of our times? What would Smith say?”

[1] For reference, the Encyclopédie would eventually comprise 72,998 research articles consisting of 20 million words spanning 18,000 pages of text spread out over 28 volumes, 11 of which contained illustrations. See, e.g., Blom 2005, p. xvi.

[2] See Ross 2010, p. 147; Phillipson 2010, p. 131. See also Kafker & Loveland 2013, pp. 195-196.

[3] See Ross 2010, p. 147. In addition to his teaching duties at Glasgow, Smith was also responsible for the university library’s “quaestor accounts” for a term of six months in 1755 and from 1758 to 1760. See Campbell & Skinner 1982, p. 56. It was in this capacity that Smith ordered books on classical literature, history, philosophy, law, and commerce. Phillipson 2010, p. 131. Some of the titles ordered by Smith are listed in Ross 2010, p. 147.