Maximilian Kasy: The means of prediction - how AI really works (and who benefits)

AI is inescapable, from its mundane uses online to its increasingly consequential decision-making in courtrooms, job interviews and wars. The ubiquity of AI is so great that it might produce public resignation – a sense that the technology is our shared fate.

As economist Maximilian Kasy shows in The Means of Prediction, artificial intelligence, far from being an unstoppable force, is irrevocably shaped by human decisions – choices made to date by the ownership class that steers its development and deployment. Kasy shows that the technology of AI is ultimately not that complex. It is insidious, however, in its capacity to steer results to its owners’ wants and ends. Kasy clearly and accessibly explains the fundamental principles on which AI works, and, in doing so, reveals that the real conflict isn’t between humans and machines, but between those who control the machines and the rest of us.

About the speaker:

Maximilian Kasy is Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford. He received his PhD at UC Berkeley and joined Oxford after appointments at UCLA and Harvard University. His research interests focus on social foundations for statistics and machine learning, going beyond traditional single-agent decision theory. He also works on economic inequality, job guarantee programs and basic income. He teaches a course on foundations of machine learning at the Department of Economics at Oxford. In fall 2025, his book The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (and Who Benefits) was published by University of Chicago Press.