CAN NARCISSISM SAVE AI?

An article published by the IMF this week warns that: A shift toward centralisation and concentration could snuff out technology’s productive potential*

The author recalls that the former Soviet Union’s technological successes in the mid 20^th Century (Sputnik, sending the first man into space, etc) led to some eminent economic experts to believe that centrally planned economies would ‘overtake the United States economically’…

And then he outlines what really happened:

 ...Yet, paradoxically, the USSR collapsed just as the computer revolution took off. Despite considerable investments—including Nikita Khrushchev’s attempt to create a Soviet counterpart to Silicon Valley on the edge of Moscow in Zelenograd—the USSR failed to harness the promise of computing technology. The obstacle was not a shortage of scientific talent, but institutions inhospitable to exploration. Whereas Silicon Valley thrived on decentralized experimentation, with inventors job-hopping among start-ups running multiple concurrent experiments, innovation in Zelenograd was centrally controlled and orchestrated entirely by Moscow government officials.**

Instead of citing the black polo-necked egg-white-omelette-nibblers of The Bay Area as an example of highly-effective decentralised collaboration, the article could, I believe, have referenced the cloak-draped humus-and-pitta-noshers who colonised Italy, Asia Minor the Black Sea around 330 BC.  In this earlier ‘age of experiment,’ the economic migrants fanning out across the Mediterranean in small boats were free from the control of their homeland authorities and had to start their newly-founded communities, or polis, from scratch:

‘So when a group of people came together to organise themselves into a polis there was no-one there to tell them how to do it. They had to work it out for themselves. Suddenly, everything was up for grabs and argument. And this is what the Greeks began to do all over the Greek-speaking world both abroad and at home: to argue, to dispute with one another, to compete to find the best solutions that would work for the community as a whole, and then persuade their peers to adopt them.***

A study released this week produced results that would surprise neither the Geeks, the Greeks or any of us ploughing our lonely farrows in The Business of Pleasure.  However the paper, entitled Surround yourself with creative people: How employee narcissism connects to creativity**** may, I believe, shed a little more light on one of the mechanisms by which over-centralised control can damage, if not actually strangle innovation at birth …by stifling Narcissism:

'This study theorises that creative self-efficacy mediates the relationship between employee narcissism and creativity, and propose(s) an important boundary condition -the presence of creative co-workers. Specifically, for narcissistic employees observing their co-workers engaging in creative behaviours increases their creative self-efficacy and subsequently increases their creativity'

To test these two hypotheses (the mediation of creative self-efficacy and the influence of co-workers) questionnaires were completed by an initial sample of 350 Chinese IT workers  (62% male, 73% educated to BA or above).  The results were then evaluated for ‘creativity’ by 45 of the workers actual supervisors and analysed by the researchers.

'...Our results reveal how a generally negative personality trait such as employee narcissism can lead to creative self-efficacy when creative co-workers are present. Thus our research enriches the literature on creative self-efficacy by uncovering a significant yet neglected antecedent of creative self-efficacy within the organizational context.  Moreover, our findings enhance the understanding of the determinants of creative self-efficacy by demonstrating the potential for negative personality traits to foster creative self-efficacy when interacting with positive stimuli.'

Adding a traditional Chinese aphorism to illustrate the impact of co-workers’ influence:

‘Those close to vermilion become red, and those near ink turn black’

The IMF article lists several examples of European and Asian countries competing in various technological arenas, from Germany to Japan and China, from cars to computers, highlighting how decline sets in when a culture of innovation is smothered by downward pressure from corporations and regulators. And while it doesn’t include any references to Narcissism (or the other two members of the Dark Triad, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy) as possibly serving as an essential energy source driving creativity and innovation, it is not difficult to imagine these Promethean forces becoming increasingly, and perhaps irremediably shackled. To the article's author, the message is simpler and more broad-based:

The lesson is clear: Economic miracles stall when the institutions that enabled past successes become misaligned with new challenges.

Adding:

The US shows the same symptoms in different guise. Since the computer era of the 1990s, its industries have grown markedly more concentrated, undercutting the fluid competition that once characterised Silicon Valley. A web of noncompete clauses now hampers labour mobility, curbs the flow of tacit knowledge, and discourages scientists and engineers from founding rival firms. Because start-ups are central to translating laboratory insights into commercial products, this drag on talent circulation weakens the very mechanism—creative destruction—that reallocates market share toward fresh ideas...

...This pattern also threatens AI. Beneath today’s veneer of intense competition, Microsoft’s deep alliance with OpenAI already controls about 70 percent of the commercial LLM market, while Nvidia provides about 92 percent of the specialized graphics-processing units (GPUs) used to train these models. Together with Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, these incumbents have also been quietly buying stakes in promising AI start-ups. Sustaining a policy regime that safeguards the competitive arena itself, rather than the fortunes of particular firms, is essential if the next generation of transformative innovators is to deliver the promised boost to productivity. That’s as true for the AI age as it was for the computer era.

And it is not like we can call on AI to fill in the threatened innovation deficit any time soon, as the IMF article rather pithily points out:

Ingenuity flourishes precisely where precedent is thin. Inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs thrive on turning the unknown into opportunity. By contrast, large language models default to statistical consensus. Imagine an LLM trained in 1633—it would steadfastly uphold Earth as the universe’s centre; given 19th century literature, it would confidently deny that humans could ever fly, echoing the long list of failed trials that preceded the Wright brothers’ success. 

…and I wouldn’t have been able to spend the past week relaxing on a rock in The Agean among the descendants of those afore-mentioned Greek start-up upstarts.

DT

18 September, 2025 

*How the Battle for Control Could Crush AI’s Promise’ Carl Benedict Frey, Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI and Work at Oxford University, International Monetary Fund Finance and Development Magazine, September 2025.

**Some of us in The Business of Pleasure may recall a similarly Soviet-style approach being trialled when Citibank decided to bankroll a West End musical.  Legend has it that a Citibank staffer had to authorise every script change for the ill-fated Metropolis which opened at the Piccadilly Theatre in March 1989, and closed six months later, in spite of being based on the Fritz Lang silent classic, boasting lavishly spectacular staging, and starring the wonderful Brian Blessed.

***Roderick Beaton’s The Greeks, A Global History, 2021. ‘…Out of that combination of reasoned argument with persuasion would be born the world’s first politics (literally) ‘the affairs of the polis’

****Frontiers in Psychology, 17 September 2025, Quiyun Guo, School of Economics and Management, Tayuan Institue of Technology, China, Fron