Dr. Gil Feiler
Artificial intelligence is built to predict the probable. It writes the answer most people would give, in the tone most people find agreeable. For routine work this is a gift. For judgment, taste and the courage to disagree, it is a quiet pull towards the middle, until the middle becomes the ceiling.In The Dictatorship of the Average, economist and investor Dr. Gil Feiler asks what happens to human judgment when the reasonable answer is always at hand. He reads the new machines through the oldest ideas about knowledge and excellence: Plato’s cave and his three beds, Aristotle’s mean 'relative to us' and his practical wisdom, Francis Galton’s 'regression towards mediocrity', Ortega y Gasset’s commonplace mind, Kierkegaard’s levelling public and Tocqueville’s mild despotism.He then tests the argument against the latest research: what AI does to the writing and ideas of the people who use it, to junior workers and the first rung of the career ladder, to hiring, peer review and corporate language, to financial markets and the risk of herding, to languages and cultures far from the English-speaking centre, and to schools and universities. Throughout, he sets out the evidence against his own thesis as carefully as the evidence for it, and labels his hypotheses as hypotheses.From four decades of investing and field research, from Istanbul in 2001 to Volos in 2015, he argues for what no model can supply: first-hand knowledge, practical wisdom, the courage to go back into the cave, and the right of the uncommon.For readers of philosophy, economics and technology, and for every manager, investor, teacher and student deciding how far to trust the average answer.
