I am personally fascinated by behavioral economics and the topic of nudges in particular. Nudges are when an outside actor changes how an individual interacts with a choice by playing on their subconscious psychological biases. However, as Prof. Goodman and Laibson discussed, we do not have a perfect deterministic model of the brain and human psychology. I would have loved to ask Prof. Laibson whether AI can help behavioral economists develop a more comprehensive understanding of psychological biases by picking out patterns in the data and exposing new subconscious, systematic human behaviors. Is the story complicated further by our inability to discern explanations from AI? How close could we get to a deterministic model of the human brain?
Woah this is a super interesting idea for an application of machine learning. I like to think that I have a good sense of where people use machine learning, but what sets this apart from the large majority of applications is its using machine learning to study another concept that requires predicting averages, rather than specific outcomes.
I was really interested in this point too Andrew. With more and more people discussing the proliferative impacts of notifications, pushes, and nudges, I would have loved to understand how our devices maintain our (un)conscious attention through the pervasive threat of a notification. In terms of explanations to describe these behaviors it seems that the bottom line in terms of profit is what drives many of these digital models in the attention economy.