A lively, optimistic counter to AI doomsaying, but one that may not convince all skeptics.
Branfman presents a rebellious take on the alleged inevitability of machine domination.
The author immediately notes the standard dystopian paradigm that seems to rule the cultural landscape: the idea that artificial intelligence and machine learning will not only replace many humans at their places of employment but also supplant humanity’s domination of the world. The view he puts forward is grounded in evolutionary development; he notes that humans evolved to be skilled in certain areas and less skilled in others, which is why humans created tools, such as AI: “In other words,” he writes, “AI is beating us at things we’re supposed to be bad at.” However, he confidently asserts that AI is not a threat: “it won’t likely care about conquest, and it won’t likely erase our intellect.” He takes readers through familiar aspects of AI discourse, from the job market to art forgery, and bases many of his contentions on what he sees as AI’s inherent stupidity—that is, its inability to do many of the miraculous (and ominous) feats ascribed to it—and he takes pains to address every fear or worry about the rise of the technology with ample historical antecedents. People have always worried that some new invention would destroy the very fabric of society, he points out, and there’s always been fears that some kind of new automation would drive thousands of people out of jobs. In all those cases, he argues—with pleasingly extensive footnotes in every chapter—the world went on, and often improved.
Branfman strengthens his presentation with consistently irreverent humor, as when he caps off a brief overview of the human propensity for violence by poking fun at himself: “Oh hey, look at that! All of human conflict, summed up in a few paragraphs. Neat!” He’s teasingly aware of the strength of readers’ skepticism, and at every turn, he seeks to bring light to the gloom. He doesn’t always succeed; skeptics will note how often the book opposing points of view into strawmen, and also how often the extent the book’s subject seems underplayed; one would hardly guess from this text how ubiquitous AI is in 21st-century American culture: “Will AI-generated deepfakes completely upend our society?” the author asks, for instance, before immediately answering, “In a word: No”—without deeply considering how disruptive it would be if people could no longer distinguish fantasy from reality on their screens. When people predict that AI will take over the world, he writes, they’re assuming that it will behave as aggressively as humans do—an observation that seems to forget that it’s humans who create AI. The book does consider the possibility that he might be wrong, but such observations feel rather bland: “Perhaps, as eons pass, we'll become intellectual again,” he avers. “Or perhaps we'll remain mindless until our species eventually goes extinct.” Overall, Branfman writes with energy and easy readability. However, some readers may wonder if his book’s nothing-to-see-here approach gives the topic the seriousness it deserves.
A lively, optimistic counter to AI doomsaying, but one that may not convince all skeptics.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2025
ISBN: 9798287876524
Page Count: 213
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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