The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence - Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb, Harvard Business Review

The year 1995 was heralded as the beginning of the “New Economy.” Digital communication was set to upend markets and change everything. But economists by and large didn’t buy into the hype. It wasn’t that we didn’t recognize that something changed. Today we are seeing similar hype about machine intelligence. But once again, as economists, we believe some simple rules apply. Technological revolutions tend to involve some important activity becoming cheap, like the cost of communication or finding information. Machine intelligence is, in its essence, a prediction technology, so the economic shift will center around a drop in the cost of prediction. https://hbr.org/2016/11/the-simple-economics-of-machine-intelligence