The danger from artificial intelligence isn’t a Terminator-style robot uprising but tech capitalists using the technology to push their own interests. Seizing control from them is the best way to ensure algorithmic technology serves the social good.

Review of The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits) by Maximilian Kasy (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

When a predictive algorithm denied thousands of black applicants fair mortgage approvals in 2019, it wasn’t a glitch but a design choice — reflecting the priorities of profit-driven tech giants. In The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits), Oxford economist Maximilian Kasy argues that such outcomes are not accidents of technology but the predictable results of who controls it.

Just as Karl Ma

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