An informative yet disturbing study and a clear warning from someone whose voice cannot be ignored.
Amid the flood of optimism about artificial intelligence, the significant dangers must be understood and assessed.
Suleyman might seem like a strange person to write a book about the dangers of AI. He is the CEO and co-founder of Inflection AI, and, before that, he co-founded DeepMind (now owned by Alphabet), a company working at the leading edge of AI research. As the author shows, however, it is precisely because he is an expert that he knows enough to be fearful. He believes that within a few years, AI systems will break into the broad public market, placing enormous computing power in the hands of anyone with a few thousand dollars and a bit of expertise. Suleyman recognizes that this could bring remarkable benefits, but he argues that the negatives are even greater. One frightening possibility is a disgruntled individual using off-the-shelf AI to manufacture a deadly, unstoppable virus. Other scenarios range from disrupting financial markets to creating floods of disinformation. Suleyman accepts that the AI genie is too far out of the bottle to be put back; the questions are now about containment and regulation. There is a model in the framework established by the biomedical sector to set guidelines and moral limits on what genetic experiments could take place. The author also suggests looking at “choke points,” including the manufacturers of advanced chips and the companies that manage the cloud. The key step, however, would be the development of a culture of caution in the AI community. As Suleyman admits, any of these proposals would be extremely difficult to implement. Nonetheless, he states his case with clarity and authority, and the result is a worrying, provocative book. “Containment is not, on the face of it, possible,” he concludes. “And yet for all our sakes, containment must be possible.”
An informative yet disturbing study and a clear warning from someone whose voice cannot be ignored.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780593593950
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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