Tag: ChatGPT

Inside The Means of Prediction and Why the Future of AI Depends on Who Owns It

The Means of Prediction by Maximilian Kasy explains how power, not technology, will define life with AI. Photo: The University of Chicago Press

Book Spotlight: The Means of Prediction by Maximilian Kasy

Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

“An eye-opening examination of how power—not technology—will define life with AI.”

Artificial intelligence is everywhere. It filters what we see online, screens us in job interviews, and even factors into decisions about justice and warfare. Its presence has become so vast that many people feel resigned to its rule, believing AI is simply our collective destiny. (The University of Chicago Press, 2025)

In The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits), economist Maximilian Kasy challenges that narrative. He argues that AI is not an inevitable or uncontrollable force, it’s a human creation, shaped by the choices and interests of those who own and operate it.

Kasy makes a bold claim: AI isn’t especially mysterious or complex. What makes it powerful and dangerous is who gets to control it. The “means of prediction,” as he calls them, consist of the essential ingredients of AI: data, computing power, expertise, and energy. These are the levers through which ownership and influence are exercised.

Inside the Book

Some of the chapters include:

  • The Story of Humans Versus Machines
  • What is Artificial Intelligence?
  • The Means of Prediction
  • Automation
  • The Ancient Questions Behind AI

Across these chapters, Kasy offers both a primer on how AI really works and a powerful critique of how it’s governed. He cuts through the noise of technical debates to ask the fundamental question:

Who controls AI’s objectives and how is that control maintained?

A Call for Democratic Control

Rather than treating AI as an unstoppable technological wave, Kasy invites readers to see it as a political and social choice. In a world already shaped by inequality, he argues that AI will deepen existing divides unless it’s placed under public and democratic control.

His framework is analytical and visionary, a blend of economics, ethics, and practical insight into how society might reclaim agency over one of the most consequential technologies of our time.

About the Author

Maximilian Kasy is a professor of economics at the University of Oxford and previously taught at Harvard University. His research explores machine learning and the social impact of AI, focusing on how technology intersects with power, equity, and governance.

The Price of Belonging: Exploring Selfhood in the Digital Age

‘Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age’ is the new book by Vauhini Vara. Photo: Barnes & Noble

Books that explore the human condition in the digital age offer profound insight into how technology reshapes identity, connection, and meaning. Some examine AI’s emotional entanglement with humans, blurring the lines between empathy and programming, while others critique our obsession with surveillance and digital transparency. These narratives question what it means to be human when algorithms influence choices, relationships, and self-worth. As artificial intelligence grows more integrated into daily life, literature becomes a crucial mirror, reflecting both our fears and hopes for the future.

New this month, from the author of “The Immortal King Rao,”finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age,” a personal exploration of how technology companies have both fulfilled and exploited the human desire for understanding and connection. (Penguin Random House, 2025)

“Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age” by Vauhini Vara

When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to build machines that could not only communicate, but could do all kinds of other activities, better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation?

Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with these questions. In 2021, she asked a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.

The experience, revealing both the power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies, forced Vara to interrogate how these technologies have influenced her understanding of her self and the world around her, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook reporter, to asking ChatGPT for writing advice—while compelling her to add to the trove of human-created material exploited for corporations’ financial gain.

Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral AI experiment that started it all. “Searches” illuminates how technological capitalism is both shaping and exploiting human existence, while proposing that by harnessing the collective creativity that makes humans unique, we might imagine a freer, more empowered relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.

Vauhini Vara has been a reporter and editor for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine, and is the prize-winning author of “The Immortal King Rao” and“This is Salvaged.”

“Vara humanizes the influence of technology in highly personal terms [and] projects what the future holds as tech oligarchs gain political influence. . . . Provocative, challenging, and concerning, Vara’s clever, eye-opening approach brings home the often uneasy confluence of individual desire, social benefits, and corporate ambition.”—Booklist, starred review

“Tragic, funny, and relatable[, SEARCHES] is by turns absurd and insightful, engaging with the ethics of algorithms, surveillance, and privacy in a meaningful way. . . . A must read.” —Library Journal, starred review

“Readers will be profoundly moved by this remarkable meditation.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review