The best thing you can say about Prediction Machines, a new book by a trio of economists, is that it is not barren. Most of the green patches you see are about the obvious: the big gain from ML is our ability to predict better, and better predictions will change some businesses. For instance, Amazon will be able to move from shopping-and-then-shipping to shipping-and-then-shopping—you return what you don’t want—if it can forecast what its customers want well enough. Or, airport lounges will see reduced business if we can more accurately predict the time it takes to reach the airport.
Aside from the obvious, the book has some untended shrubs. The most promising of them is that supervised algorithms can have human judgment as a label. We have long known about the point. For instance, self-driving cars use human decisions as labels—we learn braking, steering, speed as a function of road conditions. But what if we could use expert human judgment as a label for other complex cognitive tasks? There is already software that exploits that point. Grammarly, for instance, uses editorial judgments to give advice about grammar and style. But there are so many other places where we could exploit this. You could use it to build educational tools that give guidance on better ways of doing something in real-time. You could also use it to reduce the need for experts.
p.s. The point about exploiting the intellectual property of experts deserves more attention.