Astute if often oddball insights.
Unsettling thoughts on AI from some big-league thinkers.
The book opens with a worshipful tribute to Kissinger, who died last year at age 100. He apparently thought deeply about this subject and “closely mentored” his two collaborators on the “diplomatic alignment of humans” in their relationship to AI. Kissinger was a prominent Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Eric Schmidt was the chairman and CEO of Google, and Mundie was a chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft. Recognized AI experts, the latter two work hard to avoid repeating themselves. Within the past decade, specialists who have spent their lives warning against comparing a computer to a human brain have changed their minds. AI engineers now agree that they are trying to build something modeled on and superior to the brain without fully understanding it. Human brains are limited by the size of the human skull, but AI can grow without limit. The average AI supercomputer is already 120 million times faster than the human brain. Unlike ordinary computers, its mapping of the world is not programmed but learned. Perhaps in a nod to Kissinger, the book delves heavily into the role of AI in government. Its value lies in its potentially perfect knowledge, but that is a two-edged sword. Faced with a machine that always makes the correct choice, humans and their leaders may object to surrendering their free will, but autocrats may perk up. Readers may scratch their heads at the authors’ conviction that AI builders assume their creation will lead to a golden age of abundance, eliminating poverty, inequality, and the necessity of work. A long section devoted to problems of a life devoted exclusively to leisure contains ingenious solutions, but it’s not a subject that provokes great controversy.
Astute if often oddball insights.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780316581295
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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