This equitable work offers something for both AI enthusiasts and skeptics.
An overview of the current and prospective benefits and perils of utilizing AI.
Rus, a roboticist and the first female director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Mone follow up their first collaboration, The Heart and the Chip, by digging into the artificial brains inside the machines. The authors divide the book into three parts—“Powers,” “Fundamentals,” and “Stewardship”—and chapters bear concise, literal titles like “Speed,” “Generating,” and “Optimizing”; the longest is “Will AI Steal Your Job?” Accessible to a broad readership, that narrative delves into examples of how “we should think about making use of AI to accelerate processes in all areas of discovery, work, and life.” These areas include science, manufacturing, logistics, inventory management, transportation, and other industries, as well as in the home and in artistic contexts. “We should all think about using AI as a tool,” write the authors, “that can help us dig deeper, reach further, and imagine more boldly across all fields.” They point to ways in which AI can help synthesize raw data into useful knowledge. “It’s what we do with this information, and what ideas we generate from it, that really matters,” the authors write. "What we really want is to turn this knowledge into insight.” Citing numerous studies, they describe techniques for improving insight- and foresight-generating AI engines. Additionally, they present criticisms of the flaws, including vulnerability to hackers. One suggested protective measure is data distillation, which identifies common features of data and creates a new data set modeled on those patterns. To apply AI’s potential to a wide audience, the authors conclude, repeatedly, that people are more necessary than ever. Though the authors work in a highly technical field, they do an excellent job of speaking to nontechnical audiences.
This equitable work offers something for both AI enthusiasts and skeptics.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781324079323
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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