Useful as a demonstration of AI’s cut-and-paste possibilities, but little more.
Another exercise in cracker-barrel spirituality from New Age guru Chopra.
Why worry about AI? By Chopra’s lights, artificial intelligence “has the ability to make your thinking more intelligent and your inner life more conscious.” Marveling at the fact that AI efficiently rendered one of his YouTube videos into a Hindi translation without a lick of effort on his part—and apparently effortless enlightenment is a selling point here—Chopra sings the praises of the machine as an agent for personal growth and, moreover, an agent that, though perhaps it shouldn’t supplant sessions with “your personal therapist,” can distill the wisdom of the ages into a few guiding maxims. To his minimal credit, Chopra at least recognizes that the machine itself doesn’t have consciousness or “spiritual wisdom,” but it can create abstracts of a huge library of it “with amazing speed and distill centuries of teaching into simple, clear ideas.” Voilà: instant karma and effortless dharma, a dumbing-down that Chopra further dumbs down with his relentless cheerleading. It’s the machine that does most of the work in this book: Chopra asks ChatGPT and other engines a question or gives it a directive such as “Give seven bullet points to indicate the major benefits of meditation.” Wait a beat, and the machine spits out a list that includes the nostrum, “Meditation can help alleviate insomnia and improve sleep quality by calming the mind and reducing racing thoughts that often disrupt sleep.” Given that half of the book is machine generated, one wonders if AI is getting a share of the royalties. The question that’s truly asked and answered is this: Since the machine can generate canned spiritual instruction for anyone who asks, it would seem that a book such as this will soon be redundant, if not already so.
Useful as a demonstration of AI’s cut-and-paste possibilities, but little more.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593797525
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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