The Calculated Economy in the Era of Machine Learning

The calculation debate was one of the big moments of twentieth century economics. It was really a debate about computational complexity, even if people did not have the right intellectual vocabulary to describe it in those terms. The meeting will investigate how and whether new advances in AI change the calculation debate, looking at the weird and interesting things happening in the interstices between ML and economics. How do we think best think about these? Might cybernetics provide a useful common language for understanding the impact of these new technologies for the economy? Or do we need to turn to other sources of insight?

Partially supported by a grant from Omidyar Network.