A well-researched and frightening warning about unfettered technology.
Cohen warns against the dangers of unregulated Big Tech in this nonfiction work.
When a group of several thousand experts in the field were asked to predict the chances of artificial intelligence systems “causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species,” the average response was 10%. Per the author, this figure—given by those who embrace the technology—should terrify readers, particularly as we enter an era of exponential AI growth combined with a federal government that’s increasingly willing to turn a blind eye to corporate abuses of power. In this sweeping, cogent analysis, Cohen contextualizes our current AI boom within the larger history of technological upheaval, noting that while creators of new technologies may have “the purest of motivations,” unintended negative consequences are often exacerbated by psychological, ideological, cultural, and political factors. The author draws on a myriad of historic examples, for example attributing Adolf Hitler’s rise, in part, to Germany’s mass production of cheap radios that broadcast his firebrand speeches nationwide. The book’s opening chapters focus on the negative influences of the internet, smartphones, and social media. Seeking to learn from our most recent mistakes as we approach an AI future, Cohen highlights the ways in which social media has led to a rise in disinformation that threatens the viability of American democracy. The book’s midsection turns to Silicon Valley, convincingly detailing how Donald Trump’s administration has cozied up to Big Tech leaders like Elon Musk and created a dangerous set of conditions in which AI-centric corporations are given free rein, with minimal federal oversight. The volume’s final third offers intriguing practical solutions to these problems, outlining an approach that moves beyond the dichotomy of laissez-faire capitalism and socialism. The author’s model of economic distributism, Cohen posits, would avoid concentrations of power by “spreading ownership as widely as possible.” A tenured professor and prolific author whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, Cohen backs his arguments with impressive scholarship—the text is supported by more than 700 endnotes.
A well-researched and frightening warning about unfettered technology.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993462400
Page Count: 386
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: yesterday
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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