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In today's edition, we highlight: Artificial Intelligence  Cost of Living Kazuo Ueda on Japan's Monetary Policy  Digital Payments Asian Integration TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION AI's Next Phase is a Choice Imagine the world’s roughly 10 million scientists directing a billion virtual researchers—or 10 billion. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark painted that picture in this year’s Per Jacobsson Foundation lecture, delivered during the IMF–World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok. His message: governments must prepare for a sharp acceleration in scientific discovery.   Systems that generate new insights, he argued, could multiply human research capacity, accelerate invention, and create new industries that boost economic growth. Capturing those gains will require laboratories, scientific equipment, and electricity.   Developing economies have an “opportunity to leapfrog,” Clark said, by building scientific testing facilities and research communities. But infrastructure alone will not be enough. “An avalanche of proposed new drugs is of little use if only a handful can ever be tested,” he said. Policymakers would need to help move discoveries into clinics, factories, and fields—and across borders.   Capacity—and restraint   The harder choices concern AI’s autonomy, especially in biology and the development of AI itself. “We will need to move extremely carefully here, because otherwise we could lose control of the technology,” Clark warned. “We will also likely need rules to govern this, to govern us,” he said, explicitly including AI companies such as his own.   Another choice involves human understanding. Within a few years, Clark argued, AI could design scientific equipment suited to its own ways of working rather than human minds. Scientists and policymakers would then have to decide how much they must understand about that equipment and the discoveries it enables. He called for investment combined with restraint: “We need to constantly differentiate between the things we can do and the things we should do.” Adoption is not enough   The discussion, moderated by Per Jacobsson Foundation Chair Raghuram Rajan, focused on AI’s impact on companies and people. Peking University economics professor Yan Shen described a paradox in China’s AI development: rapid adoption and productivity gains, but benefits concentrated among already relatively productive firms. Her research has yet to find a positive effect on listed firms’ profitability. Some companies, she said, adopt AI because competitors do—not because they know it will pay off.   India’s Chief Economic Advisor, V. Anantha Nageswaran, warned that AI could remove the first rung of the career ladder by taking over junior employees’ routine work. “The people who will check AI’s work tomorrow are made on that first rung today.” He recommended requiring firms to disclose entry-level hiring and training, and excluding AI’s productivity dividend from fiscal forecasts until it appears in the data. His broader concern was around preserving human judgment: “The real risk is not that machines will start to think, it is that we will stop.” Watch the lecture and the debate INFLATION Protect People, Not Prices Shielding households from food and energy shocks does not require holding prices down. A more effective and cost-efficient response is targeted cash transfers to the most vulnerable, Chiara Maggi explained in an Analytical Corner presentation at the IMF–World Bank annual meetings.   Drawing on the latest World Economic Outlook’s second chapter, coauthored with Braulio Britos, Galip Kemal Ozhan, and Sihwan Yang, Maggi showed why such transfers matter. Food and energy shocks can leave inflation elevated long after the initial surge fades, and “low-income households are disproportionately affected because they devote a larger share of their spending on basic necessities.”   Governments often respond with subsidies, tax cuts, and price controls. These can offer immediate relief, but they also benefit better-off households and strain public finances. In the chapter’s model simulations, price-suppressing measures cost 3 to 22 times as much as targeted transfers to provide equivalent protection for low-income households. Once the future taxes needed to finance that spending are factored in, subsidies can leave vulnerable households worse off overall.   The lesson is to build social-protection systems before the next shock, so help can reach those who need it without exhausting scarce fiscal resources. Watch the video MONETARY POLICY Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda Gives Central Banking Lecture What are the lessons learned from Japan's current account surplus?   Join us on Friday, November 6, as Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda delivers the 2026 Michel Camdessus Central Banking Lecture, followed by a one-on-one conversation with IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva. Watch live FINANCE & DEVELOPMENT From Speed to Trust in Digital Payments The next stage of Asia’s digital finance journey requires a framework for responsible digital innovation, suggests Sethaput Suthiwartnarueput, a former Bank of Thailand governor, in the September issue of Finance & Development.    “The very features that make [national payments] systems powerful—speed, low cost, and finality—also make them attractive to scammers,” he writes.  Read the story GEOPOLITICS Southeast Asian Integration  Southeast Asian countries are deepening their economic ties to cushion trade shocks in a more fragmented world.   In our latest podcast, Ben Bland, director of the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House, explains how concentrations of economic power across the region complicate those efforts. His accompanying article appears in Finance & Development. Listen to the podcast Thank you very much for your interest in the Weekend Read! Be sure to let us know what issues and trends we should have on our radar.  Jacqueline Deslauriers Senior Editor | IMF Weekend Read  jdeslauriers@imf.org Stay connected with the International Monetary Fund:       This email was sent to politikimx@gmail.com on behalf of: International Monetary Fund 1900 Pennsylvania Ave NW · Washington, DC · 20431