Lawrence is a major figure in the AI landscape, but his book is marred by a lack of discipline and narrative organization.
A respected expert in the field argues that AI systems are powerful tools, but it takes a human mind to deal with life’s complexity.
Debates over AI often devolve into advocates insisting that it is the cure for all social ills and opponents arguing that the technology constitutes an existential threat to society. Lawrence avoids the either/or paradigm, and he certainly has the experience to paint a more nuanced picture: He is currently a professor of machine learning at Cambridge, and he previously served as the director of machine learning at Amazon. The author’s chief concern is that AI systems could eventually take over human decision-making, although ultimately they are in the hands of massive companies seeking profit. However, AI is inherently unable to collate crucial information with sufficient subtlety, vision, and even intuition. One of the author’s comparisons is Eisenhower’s decision to launch the D-Day invasion: “Eisenhower didn’t have complete information, he only had ‘the best information available.’ His decision required judgement: at the time he made it he knew he could be wrong, and being wrong would have dreadful consequences for thousands of soldiers and the long-term course of the war. Judgements of this form remained firmly the preserve of the human.” Lawrence advances a host of important arguments, but he repeatedly drifts away from his theme. The text sometimes feels like a stew of cultural references, as the author discusses novels, poems, and historical events that have little discernible connection to AI issues. The digressions and references make the narrative difficult to follow. The book would have been much improved by a strong editorial hand to keep the author on mission and create a shorter, more focused work.
Lawrence is a major figure in the AI landscape, but his book is marred by a lack of discipline and narrative organization.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781541705128
Page Count: 448
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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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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