Not many authors start their new book with the frank admission that their previous one was fundamentally in error. “We were wrong,” say Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb in their preface to ‘Power and Prediction’ (Harvard Business Review Press, £22, ISBN 9781647824198), a compelling essay on the disruptive economics of artificial intelligence. But you can’t really blame them for partially missing the mark in 2017’s ‘Prediction Machines’ – some might say they’re being too hard on themselves here – because their starting position was solid enough: technologies will always evolve, while sturdy and reliable economics will obey the same rules it always has done.
Again, to be fair, ‘Prediction Machines’ came out five years ago and a lot has happened in the world of AI since then. While the economic model the authors outlined ‘remains useful’, half a decade later AI has moved on. There’s an emerging and critical new chapter in the technology story to...