Category: Working notes
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As noted in an earlier post, not all statements about the future are necessarily predictions. In that post we explored the idea of a spectrum of future statements, ranging from guesses to prophecy – ordered on some kind of notion of the robustness of the data and process that led…
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What is it we predict when we predict something? The perhaps most common belief seems to be that we predict events, so that we predict event E will occur with some probability P. But how do we divide the world into events? What is an event? It cannot be a…
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Predictions are about the future, but that is about as much as we can be sure about — there seems to be many different dimensions to predictions that create a whole taxonomy of them for us to consider as we think about how to understand their role in society. First,…
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One way to think about how artificial intelligence changes society is to do what Agrawal et al do in their excellent book Prediction Machines: they assume that the price of predictions, quality held constant, will converge to zero. If we simplify: predictions will become cheaper. There is a problem with…