Description

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Welcome to the economy of algorithms. It's here and it's growing. In the past few years, we have been flooded with examples of impressive technology. Algorithms have been around for hundreds of years, but they have only recently begun to 'escape' our understanding. When algorithms perform certain tasks, they're not just as good as us, they're becoming infinitely better, and, at the same time, massively more surprising. We are so impressed by what they can do that we give them a lot of agency. But because they are so hard to comprehend, this leads to all kinds of unintended consequences. In the 20th century, things were simple: we had the economy of corporations. In the first two decades of the 21st century, we saw the emergence of the economy of people, otherwise known as the digital economy, enabled by the internet. Now we're seeing a new economy take shape: the economy of algorithms.

About the Author

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Marek Kowalkiewicz is founding director of the Queensland University of Technology Research Centre for the Digital Economy. He previously led innovation teams in Silicon Valley for one of the largest enterprise software vendors in the world. In 2023, Thinkers360 included him in its list of the Top 100 Global Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence.