Carlos Guestrin wants to stop the spread of waterborne disease, design chairs that adjust to your posture, and cure Internet-induced information overload. This might seem a bit overambitious, but Guestrin has developed a single algorithm that can tackle them all.
With the state of the world's economies as they are right now, and the appearance that neither our elected officials nor our corporate leaders know how to effectively deal with the problems at hand, these algorithms could be used to solve a lot of problems. The way I see it, if the algorithm were to be applied to the economy it would be able to figure out the best distribution of government tax revenues and in the end, it would allow the creation of truly optimized fiscal budgets that, ideally, would reduce the overall tax burden on the people and give them the best "bang for their buck."
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