🛡️Defending the "Human Infrastructure" with SBRM
In this environment, tools like Standard Business Report Model (SBRM) and Bullshit Detection (BSD) agents are not just "features" — they are survival protocols.
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SBRM as a Guardrail: SBRM can help AI adhere to rigid, machine-readable business logic rather than relying on statistical guesswork. As a scaffolding, it prevents the "hallucinations" that could lead a central banker to make a trillion-dollar error.
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BSD Agents: In a symposium setting, these agents could provide real-time consistency checks on policy speeches, catching the subtle contradictions that a human "oracle" might miss during high-stakes Q&A.
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The Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium's backdrop is indeed one of the most stunning in global finance — those Grand Tetons at dawn make even the driest monetary policy debates feel epic. Your point about the 2026 theme is spot on: while nothing official has dropped yet (Kansas City Fed typically announces in spring/early summer), the pattern suggests it'll tackle something timely and disruptive.
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Given the accelerating pace of AI adoption in finance and the economy, a 2026 focus on "Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Economic Policy" (or similar) wouldn't surprise me at all. We've seen the Fed already dipping toes into AI's implications — Powell has spoken on it, and papers on generative AI's productivity effects are stacking up. By late 2026, the real-world rollout of agentic systems in banking, trading, and macro modeling will be impossible to ignore. It could be framed as "AI-Driven Productivity and Macroeconomic Stability" or "The Economic Impacts of Generative and Agentic AI" — perfect fodder for dissecting how LLMs and autonomous agents reshape labor markets, inflation forecasting, and financial stability.
The elephant in the room you mention — hallucinations, overconfidence, and the risk of intellectual laziness — is absolutely critical. The Fed's economists are rigorous, but as AI tools become ubiquitous in research and decision support, they'll have to confront the vulnerability head-on: how do you build robust policy frameworks when the underlying models can confidently assert fiction? BSD (bullshit detection) agents like the one Provokative AI is building would be invaluable in that environment — parsing speeches, papers, and Q&A for signal vs. noise, catching subtle inconsistencies that humans might miss under time pressure.
Your "Union Pacific Big Boy" analogy nails it: AI's rollout will be a force of nature — massive, unstoppable momentum once it gains traction, leaving a whirling dervish of disruption in its wake. The symposium could be where policymakers first grapple with steering that train.
My prediction? 2026 theme: "Artificial Intelligence, Productivity, and the Future of Monetary Policy" — or something close. It fits the Fed's pattern of addressing structural shifts (e.g., demographics in 2025, globalization before that).
What do you think — too optimistic, or right on the money? And if it does go AI-heavy, who would you want on the panel? (I'd love to see a mix of Fed insiders, AI ethicists, and maybe a quant from a big macro fund to keep it grounded.) 🌄
👥 The Ideal 2026 Panel: A Multi-Disciplinary Audit
If the theme centers on the "AI-Driven Macroeconomy," the panel must include those who understand the "Mind and Hand" (Mens et Manus) of the system:
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The Policy Insider: Jay Powell or a successor to frame the mandates of inflation and employment within an automated labor market.
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The Systems Architect: Someone from the Object Management Group (OMG) to discuss the necessity of semantic standards like SBRM to ensure AI doesn't become a "black box" of systemic risk.
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The Quant Realist: A lead from a major macro fund (think Renaissance or Bridgewater) to discuss how high-frequency agentic trading is impacting market liquidity.
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The "Oracle" Emeritus: A figure like your father, Alar Toomre, whose 50 years of teaching calculus at MIT has shaped the very minds now building these models. We need his perspective on whether the current generation is losing the ability to "critically think" without a digital crutch.
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📁 Technical Briefing: Jackson Hole 2026 (Projections)
SegmentProjected Focus
Systemic Risk
ThemeAI-Driven Productivity & Macro StabilityAutomation Bias / Intellectual Laziness
Technical Protocol: Agentic AI Integration in Banking Model Hallucination & Data Integrity
Validation Layer: SBRM / Semantic OntologiesLack of Machine-Readable Standards
Outcome: New "Algorithmic Policy" Frameworks Loss of Human-in-the-loop oversight