Discover The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits) - the eye-opening new book by Professor Maximilian Kasy.
Max demonstrates how 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. Max 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.
Max 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 a powerful vision of the future of AI: a future not shaped by technology, but by the technology’s owners. Amid a deluge of debates about technical details, new possibilities, and social problems, Max cuts to the core issue: Who controls AI’s objectives, and how is this control maintained? The answer lies in what he calls “the means of prediction,” or the essential resources required for building AI systems: data, computing power, expertise, and energy.
In a world already defined by inequality, one of humanity’s most consequential technologies in centuries has been and will be steered by those already in power. Against those stakes, Max offers an elegant framework both for understanding AI’s capabilities and for designing its public control. He makes a compelling case for democratic control over AI objectives as the
answer to mounting concerns about AI's risks and harms.
Max offered further insight in an Opinion piece published in the New York Times: How A.I. Can Use Your Personal Data to Hurt Your Neighbor.
