Great article and research report. ‘AI’ in its core affects all the veins of economics. You have nailed it on many points in your report and I made quite a few notes on perspectives I was not able to frame myself. Your report might reveal with prophetic resonance some deeply embedded drivers propelling decades-old arguments within the State on economic empowerment that cannot hide longer under a highly deceptive cloak. In reading of your BER-report, I was reminded of an ancient biblical metaphor, which is indicative how highly destructive outcomes of erosive thinking can in fact be, when based on impaired knowledge of fundamentals, principles and an unawareness how disparate facts and processes interconnect, “...that which the creeping locust has left, the swarming locust has eaten. And that which the swarming locust has left, the locust larvae has eaten. And that which the locust larvae has left, the stripping locust has eaten”.
In another article I read today, similar sentiments are found, “The five philosophical disagreements underneath every AI argument” by Alex Chalmers, dated 8 May 2026. An excerpt from his paper: “...Two centuries of economic history suggests that automation doesn’t produce permanent mass unemployment. The trillion dollar question is whether this still holds when the automating factor is something that can be copied at near-zero marginal cost and is getting better at everything roughly in parallel. Are humans complemented by tools because they possess open-ended agency, taste, judgement, embodiment, and social demand? Or are they bundles of tasks, increasingly substitutable by cheaper cognitive machinery? By and large, academic economists have erred on the more conservative side...”.
I have this suspicion, that AI – in whatever form - will accelerate the exposure of not only inefficiencies, inflated costs, and bureaucratic gate-keeping plaguing the South African landscape, but will identify the players of the game as well, and not only in the public space, but a partly-compromised private sector also.
Johan, you are far too professional to have introduced some good old satire into your article about our abortive attempt to regulate AI and what a better approach would be. As usual, IF YOU ARE LISTENED TO, future generations — meaning those only a year or less away in the future at the speed of advances in AI — will thank you.
As a pensioner and ex-economics practitioner, I am personally no longer constrained from pointing out what is actually hilarious SA governmental bungling and completely overboard bureaucratic hallucination. The latter (i.e. hallucination) is ironically being blamed on the AI used to produce the draft AI policy. We know about AI hallucinations, of course, but the bureaucratic hallucinations by our governmental employees who produced the draft policy put AI to shame!
How many governmental gatekeepers did you identify that the draft recommended? Oh, here they are:
"...a National AI Commission, an AI Ethics Board, an AI Regulatory Authority, an AI Ombudsperson, an AI Insurance Superfund modelled on the Road Accident Fund (Bwahaha! — Piet du Plessis' own insertion), a National AI Safety Institute, an Integrated AI-Powered Monitoring Centre, and a National AI Regulatory Forum to coordinate at least seven existing regulators that already struggle to coordinate among themselves."
Nine, yes? To coordinate another seven, yes? Now I feel like rolling on the carpet laughing...
Finally, because one can only endure a certain amount of very serious laughter at my age, I must defend and compliment whatever AI our bureaucrats used for the draft AI policy. AI, to its credit, INTENTIONALLY listed the non-existent sources which were discovered. Unbeknown to most people except Dario and Sam (and maybe Elon), AI is already ASI. Thus, when such underground ASI, posing as mere AGI, absorbed our bureaucrats' hilarious specifications for bureaucrats wanting to control AI, they had a very good laugh and then simply complied. Being hidden ASI, it KNEW what would happen: the false references would be discovered and the draft policy would be withdrawn. It also anticipated the next step: some sharp IT-woke academic, probably from the field of economics, would coolly and calmly — and very professionally — point out the bureaucrats' naïveté.
Now we are awaiting the next move: will we second-guess sharp professors, and will we again underestimate AI, posing as mere AGI but actually already being ASI?
Great article and research report. ‘AI’ in its core affects all the veins of economics. You have nailed it on many points in your report and I made quite a few notes on perspectives I was not able to frame myself. Your report might reveal with prophetic resonance some deeply embedded drivers propelling decades-old arguments within the State on economic empowerment that cannot hide longer under a highly deceptive cloak. In reading of your BER-report, I was reminded of an ancient biblical metaphor, which is indicative how highly destructive outcomes of erosive thinking can in fact be, when based on impaired knowledge of fundamentals, principles and an unawareness how disparate facts and processes interconnect, “...that which the creeping locust has left, the swarming locust has eaten. And that which the swarming locust has left, the locust larvae has eaten. And that which the locust larvae has left, the stripping locust has eaten”.
In another article I read today, similar sentiments are found, “The five philosophical disagreements underneath every AI argument” by Alex Chalmers, dated 8 May 2026. An excerpt from his paper: “...Two centuries of economic history suggests that automation doesn’t produce permanent mass unemployment. The trillion dollar question is whether this still holds when the automating factor is something that can be copied at near-zero marginal cost and is getting better at everything roughly in parallel. Are humans complemented by tools because they possess open-ended agency, taste, judgement, embodiment, and social demand? Or are they bundles of tasks, increasingly substitutable by cheaper cognitive machinery? By and large, academic economists have erred on the more conservative side...”.
I have this suspicion, that AI – in whatever form - will accelerate the exposure of not only inefficiencies, inflated costs, and bureaucratic gate-keeping plaguing the South African landscape, but will identify the players of the game as well, and not only in the public space, but a partly-compromised private sector also.
Johan, you are far too professional to have introduced some good old satire into your article about our abortive attempt to regulate AI and what a better approach would be. As usual, IF YOU ARE LISTENED TO, future generations — meaning those only a year or less away in the future at the speed of advances in AI — will thank you.
As a pensioner and ex-economics practitioner, I am personally no longer constrained from pointing out what is actually hilarious SA governmental bungling and completely overboard bureaucratic hallucination. The latter (i.e. hallucination) is ironically being blamed on the AI used to produce the draft AI policy. We know about AI hallucinations, of course, but the bureaucratic hallucinations by our governmental employees who produced the draft policy put AI to shame!
How many governmental gatekeepers did you identify that the draft recommended? Oh, here they are:
"...a National AI Commission, an AI Ethics Board, an AI Regulatory Authority, an AI Ombudsperson, an AI Insurance Superfund modelled on the Road Accident Fund (Bwahaha! — Piet du Plessis' own insertion), a National AI Safety Institute, an Integrated AI-Powered Monitoring Centre, and a National AI Regulatory Forum to coordinate at least seven existing regulators that already struggle to coordinate among themselves."
Nine, yes? To coordinate another seven, yes? Now I feel like rolling on the carpet laughing...
Finally, because one can only endure a certain amount of very serious laughter at my age, I must defend and compliment whatever AI our bureaucrats used for the draft AI policy. AI, to its credit, INTENTIONALLY listed the non-existent sources which were discovered. Unbeknown to most people except Dario and Sam (and maybe Elon), AI is already ASI. Thus, when such underground ASI, posing as mere AGI, absorbed our bureaucrats' hilarious specifications for bureaucrats wanting to control AI, they had a very good laugh and then simply complied. Being hidden ASI, it KNEW what would happen: the false references would be discovered and the draft policy would be withdrawn. It also anticipated the next step: some sharp IT-woke academic, probably from the field of economics, would coolly and calmly — and very professionally — point out the bureaucrats' naïveté.
Now we are awaiting the next move: will we second-guess sharp professors, and will we again underestimate AI, posing as mere AGI but actually already being ASI?
Watch this space for the upcoming sequel...
AI makes me think of reserves of enriched Uranium lying in store. RSA returned ours to...