Best of the web: Artificial Intelligence news for November 3, 2016

Economists have become increasingly interested in studying the nature of production functions in social policy applications, with the goal of improving productivity. Traditionally models have assumed workers are homogenous inputs. However, in practice, substantial variability in productivity means the marginal productivity of labor depends substantially on which new workers are hired--which requires not an estimate of a causal effect, but rather a prediction. Annoyed at being automatically tagged with Facebook's facial-recognition system? Wearing a pair of tie-dye-looking glasses could help.