A thorough and thoughtful primer on the future of AI.
Wall assesses both the perils and promises of artificial intelligence in this nonfiction book.
The author, a successful entrepreneur, is not a blind cheerleader of artificial intelligence—he cautions that, if used improperly, it could “amplify our worst instincts and tendencies.” To counteract its dangers, he recommends a “human first approach,” one in which the awesome power of AI technology is channeled into the radical improvement of markets, labor, and society. In unfailingly accessible terms, Wall articulates a broad overview of the field aimed at readers with little to no expertise; he makes plain the basic differences between AI and robots, the nature of machine learning, and the ways in which machine learning both mimics and augments brain function. Wall argues that the proper employment of AI will be dependent upon the establishment of appropriate economic incentives that push technological innovation to “help us live longer and better lives.” To meticulously anatomize these incentives, he analyzes the business models of companies like Apple, Google, and Tesla, all of which are heavily invested in AI’s future. The author’s knowledge of the AI landscape is impressive, and he is especially effective at outlining the fundamental features of the technology. He convincingly explains, with admirable clarity, the distance between machine learning and human intelligence and why artificial intelligence is not consciousness, nor anything resembling human sentience. The reader can’t help but wish that Wall devoted more time to the issue of AI causing considerable unemployment, particularly since he so unflinchingly acknowledges that one of its essential purposes is to “replace human effort.” He also has a tendency to traffic in a vague moralism that seems to offer little more than platitudes: “When principles are clear, founders, owners, and leadership find it very simple to follow what they believe in.” As a single-volume introduction to the subject, though, this is a concise and helpful offering.
A thorough and thoughtful primer on the future of AI.Pub Date: March 15, 2023
ISBN: 9798987602706
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Smart Data Track LLC
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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