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Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen
Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra
Chapter 5: Our Freestyle Future For the Kasparov quotation, see “Dark horse ZackS wins Freestyle Chess Tournament,” ChessBase News, June 19, 2005, http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp ?new sid=2461, which is also the source for the information on the 2005 Freestyle tournaments. For some information on Anson Williams, see Daaim Shabazz, “Anson Williams . . . King of Freestyle Chess,” http://www.thechessdrum.net/blog/2007/12/21/anson-williams-king-of-freestyle-chess/, in addition to my interview with him. The Nelson Hernandez quotation comes from the same source. By the way, in Freestyle chess, Anson Williams and Nelson Hernandez have been part of a team for years, but they have never met, instead using the internet and Skype.
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The Arno Nickel quotation is from that same source. The Nakamura quotation is from Arno Nickel, “Freestyle Chess,” http://www.free webs.com/freestyle-chess/gmarnonickel.htm. For a discussion of how opening books work, see this useful piece by Dagh Nielsen, untitled, at http://www.spaghettichess.com/Dagh%20Nielsen_tips.txt. See http://youtu.be/JSOw1Yk_RQU for an Accenture talk by Vishy Anand on finding something new in chess and the importance of memory. In addition to Freestyle chess there is Correspondence chess. In the old days, pre-computer, chess players frequently played by mail, with lags of two to three days between moves.
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By the late 1990s, there were collaborative efforts between computer programs and top grandmasters—the human competitor would consult the program midgame. So was born “Freestyle chess.” A top-level collaborative man–machine Freestyle competition meant that a top grandmaster sat down with a computer and the grandmaster thought through the strategy of the game long and hard. The programs still had significant strategic gaps in their play, so a grandmaster supplemented or guided the strategic thinking of the machine but would rely on the machine for accurate short-run tactical calculation. As the programs improved, Freestyle chess circa 2004–2007 favored players who understood very well how the computer programs worked.
Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby
"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar
If you’re a knowledge worker hoping to keep your job (and prosper) in the age of smart machines, you’ve got to learn a lot, change what you do, and sometimes swallow your pride at the prospect of becoming their helper. Learning from Freestyle Chess Several writers who touch on what we are calling mutual augmentation do so with reference to chess. It’s definitely a realm in which some humility on the part of humans is called for. In one-on-one matches, we know the best chess players are computers these days. Yet the trouncing isn’t so complete as you might have been led to believe. The economist Tyler Cowen (not surprisingly, a chess champion in his youth) and The Second Machine Age authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee use the example of “freestyle chess,” in which human chess players are free to use as much help from computers as they wish.11 The two of us personally don’t play chess much (we like to get paid for thinking that hard), but we gather that under these rules, people often manage to beat the best programs.
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• Integrate and synthesize across multiple systems and results We humans know that any one system or decision approach is likely not to provide the only possible answer. We’re pretty good at assessing which of several sources is most likely to be correct, or at triangulating across multiple answers. Freestyle chess players choose among several different systems for each move, as we’ll discuss below. Analytics experts try a variety of different models, and take the best combination of explanatory power and reasonability. Some users of IBM’s Watson have decided to develop alternative systems to see if they can perform particular cognitive tasks better.
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The economist Tyler Cowen (not surprisingly, a chess champion in his youth) and The Second Machine Age authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee use the example of “freestyle chess,” in which human chess players are free to use as much help from computers as they wish.11 The two of us personally don’t play chess much (we like to get paid for thinking that hard), but we gather that under these rules, people often manage to beat the best programs. And although freestyle chess is a unique situation, the particulars of why that is true do seem to suggest possibilities for other forms of augmentation: • Different computer programs are good at different chess situations, so the humans can bring awareness of each program’s strengths and how to integrate them. (Computer chess programs aren’t very good at noticing that there are better programs than themselves, and recusing themselves in that situation
Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen
Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler
But we’ll put aside this prejudice, and think about the problems on the left. What problems can computers solve that we can’t? And how, when we put that ability together with human intelligence, can we combine the two to do more than either is capable of alone? As an example of the latter, in 2005 the chess website Playchess.com ran what they called a freestyle chess tournament, meaning a tournament where humans and computers could enter together as hybrid teams. To put it another way, the tournament allowed human intelligence to team up with data-driven intelligence, in the form of chess-playing computers, which rely on enormous opening and endgame databases, and which analyze myriad possible combinations of moves in the midgame.
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p 108: Bioinformatics and cheminformatics are now well-established fields, with a significant literature, and I won’t attempt to single out any particular reference for special mention. Astroinformatics has emerged more recently. See especially [24] for a manifesto on the need for astroinformatics. p 113: A report on the 2005 Playchess.com freestyle chess tournament may be found at [37], with follow-up commentary on the winners at [39]. Garry Kasparov’s comments on the result are in the fascinating article [106], which contains much of interest on the subject of computers and chess. Additional commentary on Hydra’s involvement may be found at [38].
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[35] Nicholas Carr. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. [36] Henry William Chesbrough. Opennovation: The new Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2006. [37] Chess Base. Dark horse ZackS wins Freestyle chess tournament, June 19, 2005. http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=2461. [38] Chess Base. Hydra misses the quarter-finals of Freestyle tournament, June 11, 2005. http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=2446. [39] Chess Base. PAL / CSS report from the dark horse’s mouth, June 22, 2005. http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?
Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford
3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce
Nevertheless, we should be very skeptical that this latest iteration will prove to be an adequate solution as information technology continues on its relentless exponential path. The poster child for the machine-human symbiosis idea has come to be the relatively obscure game of freestyle chess. More than a decade after IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, it is generally accepted that, in one-on-one contests between computers and humans, the machines now dominate absolutely. Freestyle chess, however, is a team sport. Groups of people, who are not necessarily world-class chess players individually, compete against each other and are allowed to freely consult with computer chess programs as they evaluate each move.
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As things stand in 2014, human teams with access to multiple chess algorithms are able to outmatch any single chess-playing computer. There are a number of obvious problems with the idea that human-machine collaboration, rather than full automation, will come to dominate the workplaces of the future. The first is that the continued dominance of human-machine teams in freestyle chess is by no means assured. To me, the process that these teams use—evaluating and comparing the results from different chess algorithms before deciding on the best move—seems uncomfortably close to what IBM Watson does when it fires off hundreds of information-seeking algorithms and then succeeds in ranking the results.
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And, more importantly, it doesn’t really involve any new people. The individuals that businesses are likely to hire and then couple with the best available technology are the same people who are largely immune to unemployment today. It is a small population of elite workers. Economist Tyler Cowen’s 2013 book Average Is Over quotes one freestyle chess insider who says that the very best players are “genetic freaks.”54 That hardly makes the machine collaboration idea sound like a systemic solution for masses of people pushed out of routine jobs. And, as we have just seen, there is also the problem of offshoring. A great many of those 2.6 billion people in India and China are going to be pretty eager to grab one of those elite jobs.
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deliberate practice, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, functional fixedness, game design, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, knowledge economy, language acquisition, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, messenger bag, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, multi-armed bandit, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, precision agriculture, prediction markets, premature optimization, pre–internet, random walk, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, young professional
Truong, Chess Tactics for Champions (New York: Random House Puzzles & Games, 2006), x. “Human creativity was even more paramount”; “My advantage in calculating”: Kasparov and Greengard, Deep Thinking. “freestyle chess”: For an excellent discussion of human-computer chess partnerships, see: T. Cowen, Average is Over (New York: Dutton, 2013). His teammate, Nelson Hernandez: Hernandez kindly engaged in an extended back-and-forth, explaining to me the nuances of freestyle chess and providing me with documentation about tournaments. He estimated that Williams’s Elo rating in traditional chess would be about 1800. In 2007, National Geographic TV: The program was “My Brilliant Brain.”
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Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers.
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In traditional chess, Williams was probably at the level of a decent amateur. But he was well versed in computers and adept at integrating streaming information for strategy decisions. As a teenager, he had been outstanding at the video game Command & Conquer, known as a “real time strategy” game because players move simultaneously. In freestyle chess, he had to consider advice from teammates and various chess programs and then very quickly direct the computers to examine particular possibilities in more depth. He was like an executive with a team of mega-grandmaster tactical advisers, deciding whose advice to probe more deeply and ultimately whose to heed.
Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson
4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise
“One, the best one”: Diego Rasskin-Gutman, Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind, trans. Deborah Klosky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 50. Together, they would form what chess players later called a centaur . . . fought Kasparov to a 3–3 draw: Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess, Kindle edition. In 2005, there was a “freestyle” chess tournament: My account of the 2005 “freestyle” chess tournament comes from personal interviews with Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen, as well as these reports: Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess; Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer”; Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen, “The Dark Horse Theory,” Chess Horizons, October–December 2005, 17–20, 40, accessed March 19, 2013, masschess.org/Chess_Horizons/Articles/2005-10_sample.pdf; “PAL / CSS report from the dark horse’s mouth,” ChessBase, June 6, 2005, accessed March 19, 2013, en.chessbase.com/home/TabId/211/PostId/4002467.
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Topalov, as it turns out, appeared to be an even better Formula One “thinker” than Kasparov. On purely human terms, Kasparov was a stronger player; a month before, he’d trounced Topalov 4–0. But the centaur play evened the odds. This time, Topalov fought Kasparov to a 3–3 draw. In 2005, there was a “freestyle” chess tournament in which a team could consist of any number of humans or computers, in any combination. Many teams consisted of chess grand masters who’d won plenty of regular, human-only tournaments, achieving chess scores of 2,500 (out of 3,000). But the winning team didn’t include any grand masters at all.
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But even that laptop-equipped grand master could be beaten by (3) relative newbies, if the amateurs were extremely skilled at integrating machine assistance. “Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer,” Kasparov concluded, “was overwhelming.” Better yet, it turned out these smart amateurs could even outplay a supercomputer on the level of Deep Blue. One of the entrants that Cramton and Stephen trounced in the freestyle chess tournament was a version of Hydra, the most powerful chess computer in existence at the time; indeed, it was probably faster and stronger than Deep Blue itself. Hydra’s owners let it play entirely by itself, using raw logic and speed to fight its opponents. A few days after the advanced chess event, Hydra destroyed the world’s seventh-ranked grand master in a man-versus-machine chess tournament.
The Silent Intelligence: The Internet of Things by Daniel Kellmereit, Daniel Obodovski
Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Freestyle chess, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, lifelogging, Metcalfe’s law, Network effects, Paul Graham, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, software as a service, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, the long tail, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, web application, Y Combinator, yield management
Considering how much decision-making ability has already been given to machines and how much more is going to go that way, and considering the speed at which information flows from sensors and devices to the cloud, will humans be able to comprehend? Are humans the major limiting factor in the development of the Internet of Things today? And, more importantly, will humans be able to cope with all this information? When we spoke with Astro Teller of Google, he reminded us of an interesting story. In 2005, there was a freestyle chess tournament hosted by the website PlayChess.com. “Freestyle” meant any humans or computers, or any combination of humans and computers, could participate in the tournament. Who do you think won? One would expect a grand master or a supercomputer, or perhaps a grand master with an average computer, or an amateur with a supercomputer.
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The company that figures it out might become the first trillion-dollar company. However, a lot needs to happen in terms of regulation and standardization to get there. In the meantime, humans will have to do a lot of strategic thinking and planning, in a not too dissimilar way from the winners of the freestyle chess tournament. In the next chapter we will look into the key areas of the Internet of Things. 15 Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1999). 16 Garry Kasparov, “New in Chess,” Chess 2.0, May 2005. Also Garry Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer,” New York Review of Books, February 11, 2010. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-chess-master-and-the-computer/. 17 Second Life is an online virtual world developed by Linden Lab.
The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game
Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 1998). famous man-versus-machine match: “Deep Blue,” IBM 100: Icons of Progress, March 7, 2012. rather than competes against them: Owen Williams, “Garry Kasparov—Biography,” KasparovAgent.com, 2010. freestyle chess matches: Arno Nickel, Freestyle Chess, 2010. centaurs won 53 games: Arno Nickel, “The Freestyle Battle 2014,” Infinity Chess, 2015. several different chess programs: Arno Nickel, “‘Intagrand’ Wins the Freestyle Battle 2014,” Infinity Chess, 2015. grand master rating of all time: “FIDE Chess Profile (Carlsen, Magnus),” World Chess Federation, 2015.
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If this database tool was fair for an AI, why not for a human? Let the human mastermind be augmented by a database just as Deep Blue’s was. To pursue this idea, Kasparov pioneered the concept of man-plus-machine matches, in which AI augments human chess players rather than competes against them. Now called freestyle chess matches, these are like mixed martial arts fights, where players use whatever combat techniques they want. You can play as your unassisted human self, or you can act as the hand for your supersmart chess computer, merely moving its board pieces, or you can play as a “centaur,” which is the human/AI cyborg that Kasparov advocated.
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee
2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K
Dutch grandmaster Jan Hein Donner summed up the current attitude of human chess masters. When asked how he would prepare for a match against a computer, he replied, “I would bring a hammer.”2 It might seem, then, that humans no longer have anything to contribute to the game of chess. But the invention of ‘freestyle’ chess tournaments shows how far this is from the truth. In these events, teams can include any combination of human and digital players. As Kasparov himself explains when discussing the results of a 2005 freestyle contest, The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop.
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Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.3 The key insight from freestyle chess is that people and computers don’t approach the same task the same way. If they did, humans would have had nothing to add after Deep Blue beat Kasparov; the machine, having learned how to mimic human chess-playing ability, would just keep riding Moore’s Law and racing ahead. But instead we see that people still have a great deal to offer the game of chess at its highest levels once they’re allowed to race with machines, instead of purely against them.
Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre
"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Air France Flight 447, air gap, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, brain emulation, Brian Krebs, cognitive bias, computer vision, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, DevOps, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, Freestyle chess, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, IFF: identification friend or foe, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sensor fusion, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, Tesla Model S, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche, Y2K, zero day
President, we and you ought not”: Department of State Telegram Transmitting Letter From Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, October 26, 1962, http://microsites.jfklibrary.org/cmc/oct26/doc4.html. 317 “there are scenarios in which”: Haas, “Autonomous Weapon Systems.” 19 Centaur Warfighters: Humans + Machines 321 Gary Kasparov: Mike Cassidy, “Centaur Chess Brings out the Best in Humans and Machines,” BloomReach, December 14, 2014, http://bloomreach.com/2014/12/centaur-chess-brings-best-humans-machines/. 321 centaur chess: Tyler Cowen, “What are Humans Still Good for? The Turning Point in Freestyle Chess may be Approaching,” Marginal Revolution, November 5, 2013, http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/what-are-humans-still-good-for-the-turning-point-in-freestyle-chess-may-be-approaching.html. 322 “On 17 April 1999”: Mike Pietrucha, “Why the Next Fighter will be Manned, and the One After That,” War on the Rocks, August 5, 2015, http://warontherocks.com/2015/08/why-the-next-fighter-will-be-manned-and-the-one-after-that/. 323 Commercial airliners use automation: Mary Cummings and Alexander Stimpson, “Full Auto Pilot: Is it Really Necessary to Have a Human in the Cockpit?
Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose
"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture
One example these types of optimists often cite is Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster who famously lost a series of games to IBM’s Deep Blue computer program in 1997. After being beaten by Deep Blue, the legend goes, Kasparov realized that human chess players and computers would be better if they worked together. So he started promoting “freestyle chess,” a type of game in which each player could consult with a computer program, and combine the machines’ insights with their own expertise. These human-computer teams, Kasparov wrote, would be “overwhelming” when pitted against computers alone. The same principle will apply, the optimists argue, to professionals in all kinds of fields.
Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will by Geoff Colvin
Ada Lovelace, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, call centre, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Freestyle chess, future of work, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, rising living standards, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen
Movellan, “The Faces of Engagement: Automatic Recognition of Student Engagement from Facial Expressions,” IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, vol. 5, no. 1(2014), pp. 86–98. MIT’s stress-monitoring car . . . http://affect.media.mit.edu/pdfs/14.Hernandez_et_al-DIS.pdf. For Cowen’s observations on competition in chess, see his blog entry at http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/what-are-humans-still-good-for-the-turning-point-in-freestyle-chess-may-be-approaching.html. CHAPTER THREE The case in Arizona Superior Court . . . The research is described in D. A. Krauss, J. G. McCabe, and J. D. Lieberman, “Dangerously Misunderstood: Representative Jurors’ Reactions to Expert Testimony on Future Dangerousness in a Sexually Violent Predator Trial,” Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 25 July 2011.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive load, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, drone strike, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, forward guidance, Freestyle chess, fundamental attribution error, germ theory of disease, hindsight bias, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index fund, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, operational security, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, tail risk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!
Machines may get better at “mimicking human meaning,” and thereby better at predicting human behavior, but “there’s a difference between mimicking and reflecting meaning and originating meaning,” Ferrucci said. That’s a space human judgment will always occupy. In forecasting, as in other fields, we will continue to see human judgment being displaced—to the consternation of white-collar workers—but we will also see more and more syntheses, like “freestyle chess,” in which humans with computers compete as teams, the human drawing on the computer’s indisputable strengths but also occasionally overriding the computer. The result is a combination that can (sometimes) beat both humans and machines. To reframe the man-versus-machine dichotomy, combinations of Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue may prove more robust than pure-human or pure-machine approaches.
Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov
3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, business process, call centre, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, computer age, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Freestyle chess, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, job automation, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, low earth orbit, machine translation, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, rolodex, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game
It didn’t render knowledge and technology obsolete, of course, but it illustrated the power of efficiency and coordination to dramatically improve results. I represented my conclusion like this: weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process. I wrote about the freestyle chess result and my conclusion in How Life Imitates Chess and expanded on it a little in a 2010 article for the New York Review of Books. The response it received was quite a surprise, as calls and emails came in from all over the world about my little formulation. Invitations to lecture about the importance of superior process in human-machine collaboration came in from Google and other Silicon Valley companies as well as investment firms and business software companies who told me that they had been trying to make this case to potential customers for years.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game
., ‘Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm’, arXiv (2017), https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf; see also Sarah Knapton, ‘Entire Human Chess Knowledge Learned and Surpassed by DeepMind’s AlphaZero in Four Hours’, Telegraph, 6 December 2017. 19 Cowen, Average is Over, op. cit.; Tyler Cowen, ‘What are humans still good for? The turning point in freestyle chess may be approaching’, Marginal Revolution, 5 November 2013. 20 Maddalaine Ansell, ‘Jobs for Life Are a Thing of the Past. Bring On Lifelong Learning’, Guardian, 31 May 2016. 21 Alex Williams, ‘Prozac Nation Is Now the United States of Xanax’, New York Times, 10 June 2017. 22 Simon Rippon, ‘Imposing Options on People in Poverty: The Harm of a Live Donor Organ Market’, Journal of Medical Ethics 40 (2014), 145–50; I.
The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma
"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population
Lund, Susan, et al. “Financial Globalization: Retreat or Reset?” McKinsey Global Institute, March 2013. Manyika, James, et al. “Global Growth: Can Productivity Save the Day in an Aging World?” McKinsey Global Institute, January 2015. Mauboussin, Michael J., and Dan Callahan. “Learning from Freestyle Chess.” Credit Suisse Research, September 10, 2014. Miller, Arthur. “The Year It Came Apart.” New York, Dececember 30, 1974. O’Neill, Jim. “Building Better Global Economic BRICs.” Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper no. 66, November 30, 2001. Peters, Heiko, and Stefan Schneider. “Sluggish Global Trade—Cyclical or Structural?”
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver
airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons
Kasparov and Deep Blue’s programmers saw each other as antagonists, but they each taught us something about the complementary roles that computer processing speed and human ingenuity can play in prediction. In fact, the best game of chess in the world right now might be played neither by man nor machine.47 In 2005, the Web site ChessBase.com, hosted a “freestyle” chess tournament: players were free to supplement their own insight with any computer program or programs that they liked, and to solicit advice over the Internet. Although several grandmasters entered the tournament, it was won neither by the strongest human players nor by those using the most highly regarded software, but by a pair of twentysomething amateurs from New Hampshire, Steven Cramton and Zackary “ZakS” Stephen, who surveyed a combination of three computer programs to determine their moves.48 Cramton and Stephen won because they were neither awed nor intimidated by technology.