CLaSP Seminar with author Maximilian Kasy on his new book, The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits) (University of Chicago Press).
The event is co-sponsored by Centre for Globalisation Research (CGR), Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) and Computational and Quantitative Methods (CQM). Federica Liberini (CGR) will introduce Maximilian and chair the session, and Isadora Cruxen (CLaSP) will open the discussion.
About the book: AI is inescapable, from its mundane uses online to its increasingly consequential decision-making in courtrooms, job interviews, and wars. The ubiquity of AI is so great that it might produce public resignation—a sense that the technology is our shared fate. In this book, economist Maximilian Kasy shows in The Means of Prediction, artificial intelligence, far from being an unstoppable force, is irrevocably shaped by human decisions—choices made to date by the ownership class that steers its development and deployment. Kasy shows that the technology of AI is ultimately not that complex. It is insidious, however, in its capacity to steer results to its owners’ wants and ends. Kasy clearly and accessibly explains the fundamental principles on which AI works, and, in doing so, reveals that the real conflict isn’t between humans and machines, but between those who control the machines and the rest of us.
In addition: Maximilian will be available for 1:1 meeting with PhD students and staff. Please email l.campling@qmul.ac.uk
Please note: Coffee and light food will be provided.
Speaker bio:
Maximilian Kasy is Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and coordinates the Machine Learning and Economics Group at Oxford. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley and joined Oxford after appointments at UCLA and Harvard. His research focuses on the social foundations of statistics and machine learning, and he also works on economic inequality, job guarantee programmes, and basic income. He teaches a course on foundations of machine learning in Oxford’s Department of Economics.