Politico May 3, 2024
Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of the Future in Five Questions. Today I spoke with Ben Recht, an engineering and computer science professor at the University of California Berkeley and author of the arg min Substack, where he writes about “the history, foundations, and validity of decision making by people and machines.” We discussed his belief that while “artificial intelligence” per se is overrated, the underlying statistical technology is deeply underrated, the late anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber, and the shortcomings of AI legislation. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows:
What’s one underrated big idea?
The power of statistical prediction and pattern recognition. The stuff that works [in artificial intelligence], the stuff that is impressive,...
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