An eye-opening exposé of how machines are replacing people in a sphere they probably shouldn’t be.
The computer will see you now.
Science journalist Oberhaus opens with a tragedy that illuminated a dark corner of medicine: in this case, the suicide of his sister, which prompted him to explore the use of PAI—psychiatric artificial intelligence—in mental health interventions and treatment. This “revolutionary New Thing,” as he calls it, has distinct advantages, at least in theory, over human practitioners: It can absorb huge quantities of information, discern patterns of behavior across populations, and perhaps detect when a psychic alarm bell is about to sound. On the other hand, as Oberhaus notes, there are 227 ways to be diagnosed with depression, while there are “more than 600,000 possible symptom combinations that could yield a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.” These are not the hard-and-fast results of scientific discovery, but instead the product of consensus built on “the ability to map these symptoms to internal dysfunction.” Given that AI, so far, has not been a reliable interpreter of emotional states or indeed of the meaning of phrases such as a teenager’s saying “I’m going to kill myself” after failing an exam, which may be serious but may also be hyperbole, it has obvious shortcomings. Yet, as Oberhaus observes, given the huge number of people who are suffering from mental disorders, with 20% of Americans experiencing anxiety requiring treatment, PAI is increasingly employed, with all its “potential for harm.” Oberhaus examines the history of PAI, with manifestations such as the popular echoic program ELIZA and newer technologies such as Facebook’s suicide prevention AI. He doesn’t entirely dismiss the possibility of machine intelligence being put to good use in the future, but this extended cautionary tale suggests that there’s still much work to be done before hailing PAI as “a new miracle cure.”
An eye-opening exposé of how machines are replacing people in a sphere they probably shouldn’t be.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780262049351
Page Count: 264
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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IN THE NEWS
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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