Power and Prediction

2 AI’s System Future

The year 2017 was awash with AI conferences. That deluge brought together business and governments, and also galvanized academics. Having realized that AI had the potential to transform economies, we wanted some of the best economic researchers in the world to think about AI. We organized a conference in Toronto on AI to set the research agenda for economists.¹

To our surprise, we had no trouble attracting a crowd. Stanford University’s Paul Milgrom, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize for innovations that spanned economics and computer science, recalled a similar invitation he received in 1990 for a conference on the economics of the internet. He had declined that one and regretted it. “I remember vividly when, in ...