When most of us look at A.I. we see magical capabilities. When economists look at A.I. they see something very different. Economist Ajay Agrawal explains: “What economists bring to the conversation is that they are able to look at a fascinating technology like artificial intelligence and strip all the fun and wizardry out of it and reduce A.I. down to a single question, which is, ‘What does this technology reduce the cost of?'” Never has one person taken such delight in stripping the fun from something awesome. But what does A.I. lower the cost of? Predictions, says Agrawal. Intelligent machines can take information we have and use it to generate information we need. Uncertainty is the single biggest hurdle in good decision making, and A.I. can drastically increase certainty in many areas, like automated vehicles, language translation, human resources and medical diagnostics. As A.I. becomes a cheaper technology, its use will become even more widespread. “Where I think it’s really interesting is that when it becomes cheap, we’ll start using it for things that weren’t traditionally prediction problems but we’ll start converting problems into prediction problems to take advantage of the new, cheap prediction.” Ajay Agrawal is the co-author of Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence.