Disruption resulting from the proliferation of AI is coming. The authors of the bestselling Prediction Machines can help you prepare. Artificial intelligence (AI) has impacted many industries around the world-banking and finance, pharmaceuticals, automotive, medical technology, manufacturing, and retail. But it has only just begun its odyssey toward cheaper, better, and faster predictions that drive strategic business decisions. When prediction is taken to the max, industries transform, and with such transformation comes disruption. What is at the root of this? In their bestselling first book, Prediction Machines, eminent economists Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb explained the simple yet game-changing economics of AI. Now, in Power and Prediction, they go deeper, examining the most basic unit of analysis: the decision. The authors explain that the two key decision-making ingredients are prediction and judgment, and we perform both together in our minds, often without realizing it. The rise of AI is shifting prediction from humans to machines, relieving people from this cognitive load while increasing the speed and accuracy of decisions. This sets the stage for a flourishing of new decisions and has profound implications for system-level innovation. Redesigning systems of interdependent decisions takes time-many industries are in the quiet before the storm-but when these new systems emerge, they can be disruptive on a global scale. Decision-making confers power. In industry, power confers profits; in society, power confers control. This process will have winners and losers, and the authors show how businesses can leverage opportunities, as well as protect their positions. Filled with illuminating insights, rich examples, and practical advice, Power and Prediction is the must-read guide for any business leader or policymaker on how to make the coming AI disruptions work for you rather than against you.

Named one of "The five best books to understand AI" by The Economist The impact AI will have is profound, but the economic framework for understanding it is surprisingly simple. Artificial intelligence seems to do the impossible, magically bringing machines to life-driving cars, trading stocks, and teaching children. But facing the sea change that AI brings can be paralyzing. How should companies set strategies, governments design policies, and people plan their lives for a world so different from what we know? In the face of such uncertainty, many either cower in fear or predict an impossibly sunny future. But in Prediction Machines, three eminent economists recast the rise of AI as a drop in the cost of prediction. With this masterful stroke, they lift the curtain on the AI-is-magic hype and provide economic clarity about the AI revolution as well as a basis for action by executives, policy makers, investors, and entrepreneurs. In this new, updated edition, the authors illustrate how, when AI is framed as cheap prediction, its extraordinary potential becomes clear: Prediction is at the heart of making decisions amid uncertainty. Our businesses and personal lives are riddled with such decisions. Prediction tools increase productivity-operating machines, handling documents, communicating with customers. Uncertainty constrains strategy. Better prediction creates opportunities for new business strategies to compete. The authors reset the context, describing the striking impact the book has had and how its argument and its implications are playing out in the real world. And in new material, they explain how prediction fits into decision-making processes and how foundational technologies such as quantum computing will impact business choices. Penetrating, insightful, and practical, Prediction Machines will help you navigate the changes on the horizon.

The increasing creation, support, use and consumption of digital representation of information touches a wide breadth of economic activities. This digitization has transformed social interactions, facilitated entirely new industries and undermined others and reshaped the ability of people - consumers, job seekers, managers, government officials and citizens - to access and leverage information. This important book includes seminal papers addressing topics such as the causes and consequences of digitization, factors shaping the structure of products and services and creating an enormous range of new applications and how market participants make their choices over strategic organization, market conduct, and public policies. This authoritative collection, with an original introduction by the editors, will be an invaluable source of reference for students, academics and practitioners with an interest in the economics of digitisation and the digital economy.

The idea of artificial intelligence--job-killing robots, self-driving cars, and self-managing organizations--captures the imagination, evoking a combination of wonder and dread for those of us who will have to deal with the consequences. But what if it's not quite so complicated? The real job of artificial intelligence, argue these three eminent economists, is to lower the cost of prediction. And once you start talking about costs, you can use some well‐established economics to cut through the hype.

The constant challenge for all managers is to make decisions under uncertainty. And AI contributes by making knowing what's coming in the future cheaper and more certain. But decision making has another component: judgment, which is firmly in the realm of humans, not machines. Making prediction cheaper means that we can make more predictions more accurately and assess them with our better (human) judgment. Once managers can separate tasks into components of prediction and judgment, we can begin to understand how to optimize the interface between humans and machines.

More than just an account of AI's powerful capabilities, Prediction Machines shows managers how they can most effectively leverage AI, disrupting business as usual only where required, and provides businesses with a toolkit to navigate the coming wave of challenges and opportunities.

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) highlight the potential of this technology to affect productivity, growth, inequality, market power, innovation, and employment. This volume seeks to set the agenda for economic research on the impact of AI. It covers four broad themes: AI as a general purpose technology; the relationships between AI, growth, jobs, and inequality; regulatory responses to changes brought on by AI; and the effects of AI on the way economic research is conducted. It explores the economic influence of machine learning, the branch of computational statistics that has driven much of the recent excitement around AI, as well as the economic impact of robotics and automation and the potential economic consequences of a still-hypothetical artificial general intelligence. The volume provides frameworks for understanding the economic impact of AI and identifies a number of open research questions. Contributors: Daron Acemoglu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Philippe Aghion, College de France Ajay Agrawal, University of Toronto Susan Athey, Stanford University James Bessen, Boston University School of Law Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT Sloan School of Management Colin F. Camerer, California Institute of Technology Judith Chevalier, Yale School of Management Iain M. Cockburn, Boston University Tyler Cowen, George Mason University Jason Furman, Harvard Kennedy School Patrick Francois, University of British Columbia Alberto Galasso, University of Toronto Joshua Gans, University of Toronto Avi Goldfarb, University of Toronto Austan Goolsbee, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Rebecca Henderson, Harvard Business School Ginger Zhe Jin, University of Maryland Benjamin F. Jones, Northwestern University Charles I. Jones, Stanford University Daniel Kahneman, Princeton University Anton Korinek, Johns Hopkins University Mara Lederman, University of Toronto Hong Luo, Harvard Business School John McHale, National University of Ireland Paul R. Milgrom, Stanford University Matthew Mitchell, University of Toronto Alexander Oettl, Georgia Institute of Technology Andrea Prat, Columbia Business School Manav Raj, New York University Pascual Restrepo, Boston University Daniel Rock, MIT Sloan School of Management Jeffrey D. Sachs, Columbia University Robert Seamans, New York University Scott Stern, MIT Sloan School of Management Betsey Stevenson, University of Michigan Joseph E. Stiglitz. Columbia University Chad Syverson, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Matt Taddy, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Steven Tadelis, University of California, Berkeley Manuel Trajtenberg, Tel Aviv University Daniel Trefler, University of Toronto Catherine Tucker, MIT Sloan School of Management Hal Varian, University of California, Berkeley