146 - Christopher E. Mason & Igor Tulchinsky: Smart Weapons, Genetics, and Predictive Algorithms

Christopher E. Mason is Professor of Computational Genomics in Computational Biomedicine in the Institute for Computational Biomedicine and Professor of Neuroscience in the Brain and Mind Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine. Igor Tulchinsky is the founder, chairman, and CEO of WorldQuant, a global quantitative asset management firm. Together, they lead a joint project between Cornell Medicine and WorldQuant, the WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction, which seeks to marry the expertise of financial prediction and analysis with genetic and medical research to improve and deploy new methods of preventive medicine. In this episode, Robinson, Chris, and Igor discuss their recent book, The Age of Prediction (MIT, 2023), and how our rapidly improving technology, data collection, and predictive algorithms are changing the world in innumerable ways, ranging from smart weapons in the military to solving crime and measuring job performance. Errata: In the introduction, Robinson says that this is episode 140, but due to a scheduling error the episode was released as episode 146. The Age of Prediction: https://a.co/d/3VAg0KD OUTLINE 00:00 In This Episode… 01:10 Introduction 03:33 WorldQuant and Cornell Medicine 10:39 The Age of Prediction 15:51 Financial Prediction 19:44 Autonomous Drones and AI 28:38 Insurance and Prediction 33:35 Job Performance and Hiring 40:30 Using Genetics to Predict and Solve Crime 52:38 Final Thoughts Robinson’s Website: http://robinsonerhardt.com Robinson Erhardt researches symbolic logic and the foundations of mathematics at Stanford University. Join him in conversations with philosophers, scientists, weightlifters, artists, and everyone in-between.