Book review: Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence, by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb.
Three economists decided to write about AI. They got excited about AI, and that distracted them enough that they only said a modest amount about the standard economics principles that laymen need to better understand. As a result, the book ended up mostly being simple descriptions of topics on which the authors had limited expertise. I noticed fewer amateurish mistakes than I expected from this strategy, and they mostly end up doing a good job of describing AI in ways that are mildly helpful to laymen who only want a very high-level view.
The book’s main goal is to advise business on how to adopt current types of AI (“reading this book is almost surely an excellent predictor of being a manager who will use prediction machines”), with a secondary focus on how jobs will be affected by AI.
The authors correctly conclude that a modest extrapolation of current trends implies at most some short-term increases in unemployment.