As a former portfolio manager who also runs a "machine learning for economists company", I have seen many examples where AI and better data can help economists

As a former portfolio manager who also runs a "machine learning for economists company", I have seen many examples where AI and better data can help economists quantify their intuitions and more rigorously test their models. My product is even called the "AI Economist" Let's face it, humans are great at organizing problems and hypothesing about the future, but we are terrible at quickly reasoning about complex interactions and finding patterns in highly noisy data. One area I'm pretty excited about here is using better machine learning algorithms to organize global production, employment and trade data to improve out definitions of business cycles. We have relied on 'high-level stylized facts' to describe the complex and fascinating global economy for too long. If you like geeking out on this stuff, my recent post goes in to it more: https://astrocyte.io/2017/01/11/ml-redefining-business-cycles/ https://astrocyte.io/2017/01/11/ml-redefining-business-cycle...