The Intelligent Toolbox

Beyond the Hype: Platforms and AI in the Era of Intelligent Tools and Systems

John Zysman
2018


The Next Phase in the Digital Revolution: Intelligent Tools, Platforms, Growth, Employment

John Zysman
Martin Kenney
2018

Digital Platforms in the computing "cloud" are fundamental features of the digital revolution, entangled with what we term "intelligent tools." An abundance of computing power enabling generation and analysis of data on a scale never before imagined permits the reorganization/transformation of services and manufacturing. Here, we expand two central issues raised in our 2016 article "The Rise of the Platform Economy."13(...

Algorithms, Platforms, and Ethnic Bias: An Integrative Essay

Silva Selena
Martin Kenney
2018

Racially biased outcomes have increasingly been recognized as a problem that can infect software algorithms and datasets of all types. Digital platforms, in particular, are organizing ever greater portions of social, political, and economic life. This essay examines and organizes current academic and popular press discussions on how digital tools, despite appearing to be objective and unbiased, may, in fact, only reproduce or, perhaps, even reinforce current racial inequities. However, digital tools may also be powerful instruments of objectivity and standardization. Based on a review of...

Governing AI: Understanding the Limits, Possibilities, and Risks of AI in an Era of Intelligent Tools and Systems

John Zysman
Mark J. Nitzberg
2020

In debates about artificial intelligence (AI), imaginations often run wild. Policy-makers, opinion leaders, and the public tend to believe that AI is already an immensely powerful universal technology, limitless in its possibilities. However, while machine learning (ML), the principal computer science tool underlying today’s AI breakthroughs, is indeed powerful, ML is fundamentally a form of context-dependent statistical inference and as such has its limits. Specifically, because ML relies on correlations between inputs and outputs or emergent clustering in training data, today’s AI...