| Editor’s Note: The New Site is Live! Our new website for Gilder’s Daily Prophecy is now live. You can check it out now by going to GildersDailyProphecy.com. Just remember that our emails will now be coming from a different domain as well. So if you haven’t done so yet, please whitelist our new address by following the instructions here. If you have any questions, please reach out to us at GildersDailyProphecy@threefounderspublishing.com. The Primary Focus of Innovation  Dear Daily Prophecy Reader,
In both China and the United States, smart folk and fashionable finance regard artificial intelligence (AI) as the key to future dominance — both militarily and commercially. If it doesn’t work as the experts expect, the results may be deeply disappointing and even devastating to your investments. Your portfolio, your computer, and your self-driving Tesla all might crash. Fortunately, AI is not the only theme of transformation that offers a dramatic investment upside. There is also a coming “master algorithm.” Three years ago, a leading AI theorist from the University of Washington, Pedro Domingos, wrote an influential book called The Master Algorithm that sums up the theory. Algorithms, as he wrote, have inputs and outputs. In the human analogy, human senses collect inputs, and our brains and bodies produce outputs. Data enters and is processed into results. Machine learning — the heart of artificial intelligence — reverses the direction as it trains the computer. Data on results and outputs enter from sensors, translators, and transducers, and the algorithm that relates them is found. This process performs for induction (from data to theory) what a Turing machine or logical computer performs for deduction (from theory to data). Ultimately, Domingos believes all knowledge — past, present, and future — can be derived from data by a single universal learning algorithm, his “master algorithm.” Big Prediction From Top U.S. Economist George Gilder Meat Machine or Real Machine? This general-purpose machine can run on combinations of NAND and NOR gates on silicon transistors on your computer. As defined by George Boole of Boolean fame and shown to work on simple transistor switches or relays by Claude Shannon in his historic MIT thesis. Domingos’ book is a fascinating survey of the field and formulation of the problem. Explaining all the main schools of AI, from symbolic logic through neural “connectionism” (with "backpropagation" correcting errors), and genetic or evolutionary “fitness survival” algorithms, to predictive Bayesian “priors” and “posteriors,” he proposes adding it all up. A master algorithm might integrate the many special-purpose AIs into a singular general-purpose super mind. The arrival of this machine, according to Ray Kurzweil, will represent a “singularity” in world history, as human beings fall inexorably behind thinking machines that can first replicate and then excel humans. Elon Musk’s company Neuralink is devoted to the proposition that human brains are essentially slow computers that general-purpose AI can program from the outside through a direct interface to the brain, a neuralink. This is a powerful faith in the idea that humans are essentially “meat machines” that can ultimately be excelled by real machines. AI has nihilist philosophical roots that I describe in Life After Google and my new AI monograph for Discovery Institute as a “materialist superstition.” Disabling AI is the paradox of its theoretical faith that theories are mere reflections of material and chemical relationships and thus are ultimately meaningless. Compounding the damage are ridiculous outbreaks of alarmism such as the late Stephen Hawking’s prediction that AI dooms the human race or Musk’s appeals for help from the government to keep AI under control or many calls for universal giveaways based on the idea that AI destroys jobs. This philosophastering by nerds poses the danger of undermining technological progress by grandiose fearmongering. Whatever else it is, artificial intelligence is the next step in computer progress. If it is retarded or diverted by delusions the costs will be huge. Therefore, prompted by Rich Karlgaard of Forbes, I was pleased to read Prediction Machines by three professors at Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and venture investors at their Creative Destruction Lab: Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. They understand that AI is just another advance in computing and like previous advances will hugely enhance human jobs, expand human opportunities, and increase human value. | 
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