Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence

by Ajay Agrawal

Lovelace had the same thought, but quickly dismissed it. At least insofar as a computer was concerned, she wrote, it “had no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.”7 Despite all the hype and the baggage that comes with the notion of AI, what Alan Turing later called “Lady Lovelace’s Objection” still stands. Computers still cannot think, so thought isn’t about to become cheap. However, what will be cheap is something so prevalent that, like arithmetic, you are probably not even aware of how ubiquitous it is and how much a drop in its price could affect our lives and economy.