Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

by Andrew McAfee

in some current contexts, the downsides of AI systems disproportionately affect groups that are already disadvantaged by factors such as race, gender and socio-economic background”

There’s an old joke that the factory of the future will have two employees: a human and a dog. The human’s job will be to feed the dog, and the dog’s job will be to keep the human from touching any of the machines.

The best way to improve the accuracy and decrease the biases of System 1 is to show it lots of examples and give it frequent and rapid feedback about its accuracy.

forecasts are implicit within a proposed plan of action. A website redesign, for example, contains the implicit prediction that visitors will like it better,

Predict Less, Experiment More

What are your most important pattern-matching, diagnosis, classification, prediction, and recommendation activities? Are you exploring machine learning solutions for any of them?

Where would better human connections most help your performance and that of your organization?

Platforms are online environments that take advantage of the economics of free, perfect, and instant. To be more precise, a platform can be defined as a digital environment characterized by near-zero marginal cost** of access, reproduction, and distribution.

“network effect”: the fact that some goods, like WhatsApp, become more valuable to each user as more people use them.

platform owners have a great deal of discretion in deciding how to configure and curate their creations. Platforms are the property of their owners,

there is often room for only a limited number of platforms in any particular domain or activity, especially when users don’t feel comfortable using multiple platforms at a time, a practice called “multihoming.”

When offerings are differentiated and customers can be locked into a specific company or brand, the destructive potential of platforms is probably more limited.

As platforms grow, incumbents can find themselves looking like utilities, with reduced opportunities for profits and growth.