A review by rick2
Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb, Ajay Agrawal

2.0

Fancy sounding drivel, unfounded speculation, and hype. The authors clearly don’t understand the technology. For example, in part two they discuss a mining truck in Australia that is fully automated. They say it’s because there are less “externalities” that it is able to be fully autonomous vs a car or road faring truck. This is nonsense. A mining truck on a single dirt road is a significantly easier programming problem. Truck goes to point A, turns around, goes back to point B. No people, other cars, dogs, or errant baby strollers to avoid.

This type of misconception permeates the book. Essentially the authors are smart sounding but without any sort of reasonable technical foundation to stand on.