A sobering and timely—if sometimes distracted—study of AI.
A look beyond the hype surrounding AI.
As researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, Muldoon, Graham, and Cant have conducted a series of field studies concerning AI’s tangible inputs and impacts, from human labor to undersea cables to the energy needed for data storage and processing. This synthesis of their studies frames AI as an “extraction machine” that exacerbates rather than corrects centuries of global inequities and patterns of oppression. In each chapter, the authors examine a different, problematic node in the supply chain for AI’s large language models, centering individuals such as data annotators and fulfillment workers to illustrate the intentional opacity and profit-driven domination of a small group of tech companies that are quickly consolidating power in the age of AI. “The technology capitalism develops isn’t neutral,” the authors write. Rather, “it is built in the image of the system that birthed it.” While the authors are well aware of potential harmful long-term implications in AI’s development, use, and manipulation, their mission is not to incite hand wringing over apocalyptic hypotheticals. Rather than wallowing in such fatalism, they focus on how even the present reality of AI erects and strengthens barriers to justice, equality, and creativity, and they set forth recommendations for stepping off the current course. The authors’ own sensitivities and proclivities are evident, including hyperexcitement about the ability of labor unions to lead such a corrective, and many of the alarms they sound are not particular to AI, leading some sections to wander and lose urgency. Still, their look beneath the hood of some of technology’s most heralded advances brings to public awareness critical issues regarding AI, its colonial roots, and its exploitative tendencies that society would do well to discuss and debate sooner rather than later.
A sobering and timely—if sometimes distracted—study of AI.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781639734962
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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
A remarkably thorough and thoughtful case for the reconciliation between science and faith.
A duo of French mathematicians makes the scientific case for God in this nonfiction book.
Since its 2021 French-language publication in Paris, this work by Bolloré and Bonnassies has sold more than 400,000 copies. Now translated into English for the first time by West and Jones, the book offers a new introduction featuring endorsements from a range of scientists and religious leaders, including Nobel Prize-winning astronomers and Roman Catholic cardinals. This appeal to authority, both religious and scientific, distinguishes this volume from a genre of Christian apologetics that tends to reject, rather than embrace, scientific consensus. Central to the book’s argument is that contemporary scientific advancements have undone past emphases on materialist interpretations of the universe (and their parallel doubts of spirituality). According to the authors’ reasoned arguments, what now forms people’s present understanding of the universe—including quantum mechanics, relativity, and the Big Bang—puts “the question of the existence of a creator God back on the table,” given the underlying implications. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for instance, presupposes that if a cause exists behind the origin of the universe, then it must be atemporal, non-spatial, and immaterial. While the book’s contentions related to Christianity specifically, such as its belief in the “indisputable truths contained in the Bible,” may not be as convincing as its broader argument on how the idea of a creator God fits into contemporary scientific understanding, the volume nevertheless offers a refreshingly nuanced approach to the topic. From the work’s outset, the authors (academically trained in math and engineering) reject fundamentalist interpretations of creationism (such as claims that Earth is only 6,000 years old) as “fanciful beliefs” while challenging the philosophical underpinnings of a purely materialist understanding of the universe that may not fit into recent scientific paradigm shifts. Featuring over 500 pages and more than 600 research notes, this book strikes a balance between its academic foundations and an accessible writing style, complemented by dozens of photographs from various sources, diagrams, and charts.
A remarkably thorough and thoughtful case for the reconciliation between science and faith.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9789998782402
Page Count: 562
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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