A well-researched, balanced, and optimistic case for the future of AI.
A debut author and technologist surveys the present landscape, and potential, of artificial intelligence.
The national conversation surrounding AI, writes author Wang, “remains a manic seesaw between glee and terror.” Compounding the confusion is that the most informed sources on AI are riddled with technical jargon and buried in academic publications. In response, Wang offers readers a thorough, yet decisively nontechnical work (readers looking for in-depth discussions of loss functions or tanh activations can look elsewhere). Divided into three parts, the book’s opening chapters place AI within a larger historical context of technologies that have disrupted now obsolete professions while opening new avenues elsewhere. The rise of the computer in the 1950s, for example, eliminated a range of logistics and navigation jobs that relied on human computations. But by the 2020s, almost a quarter of all jobs in the U.S. were in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Rather than closing off workers’ access to jobs, the computer created entirely new fields of expertise. This favorable tradeoff, per the author’s reading of history, is the story of technological leaps writ large: It’s almost always a net positive. Part Two is more pragmatic and surveys the practical applications of AI, both in the present and potentially in the future. The final section makes the case that “the rise of AI will likely increase the value of our very humanity.” Given demographic trends, AI will be essential, per the author’s cogent argument, in supplementing the vital work of electrical and electronics engineers, for example. While the tone of the volume is generally positive towards AI, its nuanced approach acknowledges the role of the technology as a force that “will disrupt” not only the workforce, but multiple facets of human life from armed warfare to the workforce. Wang, who has been involved with AI for more than a decade through work with Google and as a venture capitalist, supports his argument with 350-plus research endnotes.
A well-researched, balanced, and optimistic case for the future of AI.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798889265825
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Manuscripts LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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