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The key claim of the presentation:

“For predicting social outcomes, AI is not substantially better than manual scoring using just a few features”

Suggests that only a simple heuristic is needed: if the AI salesman claims their product predicts a social outcome, like a candidate’s job performance or a person’s future criminality, it is snake oil.



And I bet I can beat that with a trivial algorithm: if(marketing copy contains the word 'AI') return 'bullshit'.

WRT. presentation, I didn't read it as claiming that just predicting social outcomes is hard; I read it as saying that perception is the only category where "AI" actually works somewhat (from the "automating judgement" part, I'd argue only spam detection works; I'm yet to hear of any effective ML solution for the rest of the bullet points there).




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