The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits)

An eye-opening examination of how power-not technology-will define life with AI. AI is inescapable, from its mundane uses online to its increasingly consequential decision-making in courtrooms, employment interviews, and wars.The ubiquity of AI is so great that it’s even produced public resignation-a sense that the technology is our shared fate. As economist Maximilian Kasy shows in The Means of Prediction, artificial intelligence, far from being an unstoppable force, is irrevocably shaped by human decisions-choices made to date by the ownership class steering its development and deployment.Kasy shows that the technology of AI is not complex.It is insidious, however, in its capacity to steer results to its owners’ wants and ends.Kasy clearly and accessibly explains the fundamental principles on which AI works, and, in doing so, reveals that the real conflict isn’t between humans and machines, but between those who control the machines and the rest of us. The Means of Prediction offers