Former world chess champion and human rights activist Kasparov (Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped, 2015, etc.) offers an optimistic view of humankind’s relationship with machines.
“With every new encroachment of machines, the voices of panic and doubt are heard, and they are only getting louder today,” writes the author, who famously lost a chess match against IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997. Since his retirement from professional chess, Kasparov has used his experience as a window on human-machine decision-making, in talks to business groups and in work as a visiting fellow at the Oxford Martin School. In this intelligent, absorbing book, he manages to both tell the story of his encounter with IBM’s machine (with the “speed and depth of brute force search” to exploit human mistakes) and celebrate the untold coming benefits of smart machines. His detailed inside account of Deep Blue reflects on his own poor play and the likelihood that IBM gave its machine unfair advantages. As he said at the time, “I do not blame IBM, I blame myself.” Kasparov also notes how chess-playing computers get stronger, change their openings, and pay no attention to “the competitive and psychological aspects of chess.” Observing that most of us will be as disconcerted by driverless cars as he was by chess-playing machines, he urges that we take advantage of the proliferation of computers as they assume many roles of lawyers, bankers, doctors, and other professionals. “It’s remarkable how quickly we go from being skeptics to taking a new technology for granted,” he writes. Overreliance on machines may be dangerous if you want to innovate rather than imitate, but listening to them allows you to overcome your emotional biases. Given honest data, machines can “make us into better decision makers.”
Thoughtful reading for anyone interested in human and machine cognition and a must for chess fans.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61039-786-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
Categories: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.
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Award-winning scientist Jahren (Geology and Geophysics/Univ. of Hawaii) delivers a personal memoir and a paean to the natural world.
The author’s father was a physics and earth science teacher who encouraged her play in the laboratory, and her mother was a student of English literature who nurtured her love of reading. Both of these early influences engrossingly combine in this adroit story of a dedication to science. Jahren’s journey from struggling student to struggling scientist has the narrative tension of a novel and characters she imbues with real depth. The heroes in this tale are the plants that the author studies, and throughout, she employs her facility with words to engage her readers. We learn much along the way—e.g., how the willow tree clones itself, the courage of a seed’s first root, the symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, and the airborne signals used by trees in their ongoing war against insects. Trees are of key interest to Jahren, and at times she waxes poetic: “Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.” The author draws many parallels between her subjects and herself. This is her story, after all, and we are engaged beyond expectation as she relates her struggle in building and running laboratory after laboratory at the universities that have employed her. Present throughout is her lab partner, a disaffected genius named Bill, whom she recruited when she was a graduate student at Berkeley and with whom she’s worked ever since. The author’s tenacity, hope, and gratitude are all evident as she and Bill chase the sweetness of discovery in the face of the harsh economic realities of the research scientist.
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87493-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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