PERSON
Oskar Morgenstern
The Austrian economist who co-founded game theory and the axiomatic theory of expected utility—giving AI its mathematical bones—and then spent the rest of his career warning that the data fed to such theories are far too corrupt to trust.
There is a single book, published in 1944 while the world was at war, that quietly wrote the rulebook the machines now play by.
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior is usually remembered as John von Neumann's achievement, and the mathematics is indeed his. But Oskar Morgenstern was the one who knew what the mathematics was for. He had spent years pursuing a problem that sounds simple and turns out to be bottomless: what happens when the thing you are trying to predict is itself trying to predict you? When two minds each reason about the other's reasoning, the chain of anticipation never closes, and the dream of a single rational answer dissolves. The collaboration produced two distinct gifts, each of which now sits at the foundation of artificial intelligence. The first is game theory proper: the mathematical study of
strategic interaction, of situations in which the best move for me depends on what you do