Title: Prediction Machines
Author: Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb
Type: Non-Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 262
Rating: 4/5
I’ve been putting this book off for a little while, and I’m not really sure why. I think I thought it was going to be slow going, but it turns out that I whizzed through it in a day or so. I wasn’t too worried about the subject matter, even though it’s non-fiction about artificial intelligence from the Harvard Business Review press.
This was actually recommended to me by a client of mine, Emmanuel Fombu, who specialises in writing and talking about the future of healthcare. It was a good recommendation on his part, especially because there is some stuff here that focusses directly on the impact of artificial intelligence in the healthcare industry. But it’s not just healthcare that’s covered here, and indeed I think the authors did a good job of covering a wide variety of different use cases.
It was also interesting to read right now because my current “bedtime book” is The Enigma by Andrew Hodges, a biography of Alan Turing. His work had a huge impact on the development of artificial intelligence and what the authors here call “prediction machines”, and indeed one of the main tests that an AI must pass if it’s to be able to pass as a human is named after Turing: the Turing Test.
All in all then, if you have an interest in AI and the way in which it’s changing our society, read this.
