Calvin Lo warns AI's 'too right' answers could distort markets and life choices

R.E. Lee International CEO Calvin Lo says he worries less about AI being wrong than about millions acting on the same correct answer, which can change outcomes. He warns that fast AI answers can mislead people into making slow-to-reverse decisions in careers, investments and parenting.

Artificial intelligence has sparked debate over whether the technology is advancing too quickly, but R.E. Lee International chief executive Calvin Lo sees a different risk. “I’m actually less worried about AI getting the answer wrong,” Lo told Sing Tao Headline, the sister publication of The Standard. “Sometimes I worry more about it getting the answer too right.”

Lo illustrated with a simple example: if AI recommends a restaurant to one person, the advice works. But if 100,000 people receive the same recommendation simultaneously, the restaurant becomes fully booked. “Nothing about the restaurant has changed, and the AI wasn’t wrong,” he said. “The problem is that too many people received the same correct answer at the same time.”

He applies the same logic to career planning. Suppose AI predicts a profession will face a severe shortage in ten years. “You look at the analysis and it makes complete sense, so you start preparing your child to go in that direction,” Lo said. “But what if families in Hong Kong, Singapore, London and New York are all seeing roughly the same thing and making the same decision? Ten years later, when all those children graduate, will that profession still have the shortage everyone expected?”

In investing, Lo said the effect is even more obvious. If AI tells every fund manager at 7am that a stock is trading 30 per cent below fair value, everyone buys, the price rises and the discount disappears. “The company hasn’t suddenly become worse. The analysis wasn’t wrong. But by the time you buy, the price is no longer the price the AI analysed.”

Lo stressed that AI does not need to go rogue. “It can give you perfectly reasonable analysis every time, and you still make the final decision yourself. But once everybody has made their decisions, the world that AI originally analysed may already have changed.” He noted that AI can update its answer in seconds, but a child who has spent three years studying a subject cannot get those years back.

He urged people to distinguish between the speed of an answer and the speed of a decision. “If a decision commits you for three years, five years or ten years, or affects the path your child will take, don’t make it in three seconds just because AI gave you the answer in three seconds.”