Description

Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly capable. We are already rebuilding institutions around it.

Average asks what disappears in the process.

Expertise is accumulated slowly, through experience and the difficult cases that refuse to behave as expected. Much of it is never written down. When AI takes on work that once required people to interpret evidence or exercise judgement, institutions can automate routine decisions and shorten existing processes. They may also weaken the routes through which people learn when the normal answer is wrong.

Mark Unwin spent most of his career inside public institutions and now runs an artificial intelligence company. In Average, he follows the consequences of this shift through working life and public services. The book examines what happens when institutional knowledge grows while human understanding becomes difficult to sustain.

It also considers a different possibility. AI can be used to preserve the reasoning behind difficult cases and retain expertise that would otherwise leave with the people who developed it.

Average is about the choices being made now, while those choices are still ours.