Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and I discuss his new book Guardrails: Guiding Human Decisions in the Age of AI (co-written with Urs Gasser, who I also had the pleasure of meeting at his book talk at NYU). In Guardrails, the authors suggest that in the age of AI, a focus on data is mistaken, or at least dangerously incomplete. Because AI's real promise isn't better access to insights; it is improved decisions. The more we realize humans' cognitive flaws and experience the power of data-driven machine learning, the more we are tempted to delegate decision agency to the machine.
What we need to focus on is no longer network governance, nor data governance, it's decision governance. And for this focus, we are conceptually ill prepared. To jump-start the discussion, Guardrails puts forward four design principles for decision governance and suggest that the real innovation we need to make it happen is less technical than social.
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Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute / Oxford University. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Belfer Center of Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. In addition to "Guardrails: Guiding Human Decisions in the Age of AI", Mayer-Schönberger has published nine books (including “Framers”, international bestseller "Big Data" and the awards-winning “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” with Princeton University Press) and is the author of over a hundred articles and book chapters on the information economy.
After successes in the International Physics Olympics and the Austrian Young Programmers Contest, Mayer-Schönberger studied in Salzburg, Harvard and at the London School of Economics. In 1986 he founded Ikarus Software, a company focusing on data security and developed the Virus Utilities, which became the best-selling Austrian software product. He was voted Top-5 Software Entrepreneur in Austria in 1991 and Person of the Year for the State of Salzburg in 2000.
He is a frequent public speaker, and sought expert for print and broadcast media worldwide. He and his work have been featured in (among others) New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist, Nature, Science, NPR, BBC, The Guardian, Le Monde, and WIRED. He is also on the boards of foundations, think tanks and organizations focused on studying the information economy, and advises governments, businesses and NGOs on new economy and information society issues.
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