[co-authored with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb; originally published on HBR.org on 26th July 2017] With the recent explosion in AI, there has been the understandable concern about its potential impact on human work. Plenty of people have tried to predict which industries and jobs will be most affected, and which skills will be most …
The Trade-Off Every AI Company Will Make
Co-authored with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb [This post appeared in HBR Online on March 28, 2017] It doesn’t take a tremendous amount of training to begin a job as a cashier at McDonald’s. Even on their first day, most new cashiers are good enough. And they improve as they serve more customers. Although a …
What to Learn from US Govt Strategy on AI
[This post was co-authored with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb. A shorter version was published in HBR Online on 21st December 2016. Also, the post does not review a new White House paper on AI and its impact released on 20th December 2016, that cites some posts on this blog.] On October 12, 2016, President …
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AI and Competition Policy
I participated at an interesting panel at an antitrust conference in Brussels today. I was about big data and whether it will be a problem for competition policy. This is something that has been widely discussed but there is little resolution on the issue. When it comes to the potential problems that arise from big …
Falling Costs: Two Non-Technical Papers
This is just a pointer to two new (non-technical) papers of mine that look at the implications of various falling costs associated with new technologies. The first is a much longer version of the blog post earlier this week on the simple economics of artificial intelligence. "Managing the Machines" co-authored with Ajay Agrawal and Avi …
Tesla's use restrictions for autonomous driving
At a conference last week on the sharing economy (video here), an audience member asked me about the following clause in Tesla's autonomous driving agreement: Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible …
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The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence
[This post was co-written with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb and appeared in HBR.org on 17 November 2016] The year 1995 was heralded as the beginning of the “New Economy.” Digital communication was set to upend markets and change everything. But economists by and large didn’t buy into the hype. It wasn’t that we didn’t recognize …
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Go, AI and Game Theory
I haven't played Go but have been reading about it over the last little while since it turned out that an AI learned to beat the world champion in it. The significance of this is that those who knew the game of Go believed that it was out of a machine's reach to learn to …
Digitopoly 