To sort out the exponential advance of deep-learning algorithms and what it means for managerial science, McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland conducted a series of interviews in January at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos.
Among those interviewed were two leading business academics—Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, coauthors of The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (W. W. Norton, January 2014)—and two leading entrepreneurs: Anthony Goldbloom, the founder and CEO of Kaggle (the San Francisco start-up that’s crowdsourcing predictive-analysis contests to help companies and researchers gain insights from big data); and data scientist Jeremy Howard. This edited transcript captures and combines highlights from those conversations.