I was at a wedding recently and my newly acquired dinner-table friend and I hit it off talking about AI, which I might’ve started. It’s a favorite topic of mine.
As we all squeezed past chairbacks into the line for food, he marveled absently at what the next five years could possibly bring. “We’ll all be drowning in subscription services.” I declared. “Every last cent will have been identified and pre-allocated. We’ll subscribe to multiple AI services but the privacy we cede to make them work efficiently will work against us when they know exactly how much we can afford.” I didn’t know until it blurted out of my mouth that I thought that. I too often learn things about myself this way.
I later told AI my prediction.
“That’s a chilling thought” It began. “—the notion that AI could serve as the final piece in a meticulously tuned economic mechanism, ensuring no surplus for the individual beyond what is strictly necessary. Dynamic pricing already exists in sectors like airlines, e-commerce, and even digital services, adjusting costs based on demand, location, and user data. But what happens when this concept is pushed to its extreme, where AI models fully optimize personal finances across every transaction?
Imagine an era where your spending power is not just tracked but preemptively adjusted—AI-driven financial models setting product prices based on how much is in your account, ensuring you can afford something, but never accumulate excess. This could reshape wealth distribution, effectively locking people into economic tiers where upward mobility becomes algorithmically suppressed.
It also opens questions about control. Who decides where the threshold lies between survival and prosperity? Do we trust corporations to wield such power responsibly, or will governments attempt to intervene and regulate AI-driven markets? It might turn into a pay-for-access reality, where the ability to even use certain AI-enhanced services depends on how much financial data you allow them to see, creating entirely new forms of economic discrimination.
The more AI understands human behavior, the more it can refine pricing, advertising, and market demand to nudge people into specific financial and psychological states.
The unexpected revolution here might not be AI displacing jobs or taking over industries—it could be AI ensuring every transaction extracts the precise amount needed to keep individuals compliant within the economy, neither failing nor thriving.” The AI (Copilot) mused.
The cyclicals of history in finance are not to be ignored, I have recently learned. Capitalism has always wanted to extract maximum value out of an individual while also ensuring that they have just enough for survival and nothing more. Think company towns. Think sharecropping. I’d argue that what Copilot worried about as a novel problem presented by it’s own existence has always been the trajectory of capitalism and AI just accelerates it with surgical precision.
The fantastic problem with nearly all AI is that it’s prone to backing your way of thinking, your ideas, your ambitions, enthusiastically; even if those ideas are actually quite bad. The studies they’ve done are hilarious. There’s no guarantee of this particular flavor of dystopia, but I can conversely say that I promise a future full of both AI and dynamic pricing and the two are to be inevitably paired.
My AI is gonna think like me and I’ve grown to think that while we worry about AI influencing government and taking jobs, it could quietly turn capitalism into a perfectly sealed machine of compliance.
How does one buck this impending thing and prevent it from happening?
Do you see a future where AI and dynamic pricing could honestly be utilized for the greater good under our cutthroat system of capitalism? What does that look like?
Would this lead to a backlash? A rise in decentralized economies, underground markets, or AI-resistant transaction models? Or do you think people would just accept it as the new norm?