VIII. Concluding Thoughts
The purpose of this exploratory essay has not been to provide a systematic account or
prediction of the likely impact of AI on innovation, nor clear guidance for policy or the
management of innovation. Instead, our goal has been to raise a specific possibility—that deep
learning represents a new general-purpose invention of a method of invention—and to draw out
some preliminary implications of that hypothesis for management, institutions, and policy.
Our preliminary analysis highlights a few key ideas that have not been central to the
economics and policy discussion so far. First, at least from the perspective of innovation, it is
useful to distinguish between the significant and important advances in fields such as robotics
from the potential of a general-purpose method of invention based on application of multilayered neural networks to large amounts of digital data to be an “invention in the method of
invention”.