Dan Erwin

2018 Was a Banner Year for Algorithmic Prediction

Harvard’s Jill Lepore, one of the most fascinating and actually humorous historical writers, has superb explanatory insight on algorithmic prediction. That’s not a surprise. She approaches history from perspectives that have never crossed this historian’s mind--and does it with a lot of verve. She’s one of the few with a steady hand when the rest of us are lurching around with churning stomachs about artificial intelligence and moronic politicians.

With two algorithmic geniuses in my own family, a son-in-law and a recently minted CMU data-scientist grandson, with whom I spent an hour listening and trying to make sense of their conversation over Christmas, Lepore is an absolute delight at algorithmic explanation. 

She regularly seems to have the ability to...

Fearful You'll Lose Your Job to Artificial Intelligence?

Two of MIT’s most knowledgeable guys on artificial intelligence, Andrew McAFee and Erik Brynjolfsson, will tell you to cool it. In fact, they argue that asking how many jobs will be killed by AI is the wrong question. Sure, Frey and Osborne’s 2015 analysis found that nearly 50% of current jobs are susceptible to AI. But by no stretch of the imagination is that the whole picture.

Like previous predictions about gains and losses, they’ve almost always been way off. Furthermore, nearly all these predictions have been about job destruction and not job creation...