A deeply human dive into the AIs that are transforming our world.
Guiding us through the origins and ethics of AI.
What is artificial, what is intelligence, and how are the AI systems surrounding us being created? In this clear and engaging volume, De Kai, a pioneer in machine learning and natural language processing, invites readers into the history of AI to explore deeply philosophical questions on the nature of human thinking and belief. With humor, diagrams, and plentiful examples, De Kai takes readers below the surface of popular chatbots and search engines to the broad field of scientific inquiry living at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and computer science, reflecting researchers’ observations about human intelligence. Artificial brains that mirror and learn from human behavior and culture learn our biases and stereotypes. Creating ethical, empathetic models requires our careful nurturing, as we might nurture children. AI’s infamous darker side skews the news, generates deepfake images, amplifies biases, and dangerously polarizes political discourse. De Kai notes that companies would prefer industry-wide guidelines and a level playing field to craft responsible (but unprofitable) AI controls. The impact on jobs and creative endeavors is not the focus here; this volume does not dwell on the underlying economics of various models and companies. But instilling empathy and ethics in our artificial influencers calls for guiding them so they can guide us. Suggestions on how to perfect our AI “children” are detailed and thoughtful, while evoking Jorge Luis Borges’ tale of a mapmaking process so exacting it grows as large as the world it represents. Ultimately, this primer argues that the stakes are high, the situation is urgent, and we all have a role to play. By engaging with AI consciously and ethically, we can help shape better systems—by first calling forth our better selves.
A deeply human dive into the AIs that are transforming our world.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780262049764
Page Count: 280
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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