1929, AI and the leadership challenge

One of my best summer reads was Andrew Ross Sorkin’s excellent 1929, which I highly recommend.

It is a remarkably well documented account of the 1929 crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, seen through the people who were at the center of it on Wall Street, in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

What struck me is how an increasingly sophisticated and democratized financial system, combined with greed, intense lobbying by the business elite, often in the name of national interests, ideology and political battles, ultimately contributed to an economic disaster of extraordinary proportions.

Of course, 1929 and today are very different. But when we see similar patterns emerging, we should always learn from history.

For anyone watching the transformations happening today, and particularly the extraordinary progress of AI and the economic risks that come with it, there is a lot to think about. The lessons are not only about what could happen to the job market. They are also about risks to the financial system, extraordinary valuations, the prospect of increasingly complex trading becoming widely accessible through ubiquitous AI agents, the concentration of wealth and power, and the difficulty regulators have keeping up with the speed and magnitude of change.

Ultimately, this is a leadership challenge. One quote in the book particularly resonated with me. In his first inaugural address in March 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt said:

“They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”

Pierre Le Manh, Founder and Principal, NeuronVentures