“In The Means of Prediction, economist Maximilian Kasy offers something refreshingly different: a political economy of Artificial Intelligence. While debate rages about whether AI will deliver us from material scarcity, impoverish the world’s workers, or transform us into paper clips, Kasy offers a plain, forceful, and almost self-evidently correct reframing: the fundamental conflicts surrounding AI are not between humans and machines but among humans with divergent interests. . . . The Means of Prediction makes a searing contribution to an otherwise overcrowded genre by reframing AI governance as fundamentally a question of political economy rather than engineering. . . . For economists, social scientists, and policymakers accustomed to thinking about inequality, decision rights, and collective action, Kasy provides the conceptual vocabulary to engage with AI on familiar terrain.”

"Kasy argues that engineers, entrepreneurs and corporations are shaping Artificial Intelligence to advance their own interests and not those of society, and that governments must regulate the technology to address this problem. In developing his argument, the author provides an admirably clear and compact explanation—the best one out there—of what AI is, and what it can and cannot do."

“If the thought of a ubiquitous, mostly invisible predictive layer secretly grafted onto your life by a bunch of profit-hungry corporations makes you uneasy . . . well, same here. This arrangement is leading to a crueler, blander, more instrumentalized world, one where life’s possibilities are foreclosed, age-old prejudices are entrenched, and everyone’s brain seems to be actively turning into goo. It’s an outcome, according to Kasy, that was entirely predictable.”

“For Maximilian Kasy. . . the truly important, and terrifying, question regarding artificial intelligence is: Who controls it? A professor of economics at the University of Oxford, this mathematician and expert in machine learning techniques has just published The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits). . . In this book, he argues that the fundamental conflicts surrounding AI do not originate from a struggle between humans and machines, but rather between those who control this technology and everyone else.”

“This accessible economic analysis of artificial intelligence reviews AI's ‘means of prediction’: data, computational infrastructure, technical expertise, and energy. Kasy explains and assesses how AI algorithms work and the objectives behind AI applications, drawing on examples ranging from estimating civilian casualties in military strikes to personalized advertising, offering a balanced forecast of both beneficial and harmful future applications. . . . The text highlights risks of underregulated AI but also shows that societies can empower those impacted by AI’s algorithms, not just those who control the means. Recommended.”

"Kasy . . . makes the case that government regulation is needed to guide the development of artificial intelligence. . . . As his argument unfolds, Kasy provides a clear and concise explanation of how AI works and what it can and cannot do.”