Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb.
Ajay Agrawal is an economics professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management as well as the Professor of Strategic Management.
Joshua Gans is a Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Joshua is also Chief Economist of the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab.
Avi Goldfarb is the Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and Professor of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Avi is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab, Senior Editor at Marketing Science, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In addition, Avi’s research focuses on the opportunities and challenges of the digital economy.
Ajay, Avi, and Joshua are certainly diving deep into the disruptive and transformational world of decision making. They are framing AI as a prediction tool. Perhaps most important is today’s economies of scale make this very inexpensive yet is not designed to remove or replace humans from their jobs. Yet the impact of AI will be far reaching across industries, work and the daily lives of global citizens.
AI is the future of prediction
They are presenting really well researched positions that AI is the future of prediction. This will be a collaboration between AI services and humans. Obviously AI services will be able to compute massively complex datasets that are too immense for humans to calculate. However, their key message is humans will ultimately decide how to act upon the data. Much of this is addressed when human are needed to address outliers. Ultimately they address the need for human-machine collaboration. This is also addressed by David Weinberger’s Everyday Chaos.
So, is your organization ready ?
In conclusion, Prediction Machines is a very insightful book, providing much needed insights into AI prediction. Ajay, Avi, and Joshua provide an understanding of how AI and humans can benefit and drive new value by understanding both the strengths and weaknesses of humans and AI services. Very insightful and a must read.