An upbeat—even reassuring—take on what will be an AI–saturated future.
Two British experts offer an antidote to widespread “scaremongering” about “the unstoppable dangers of artificial intelligence.”
In this calm, deeply informed, and accessible consideration of artificial intelligence, Shadbolt (Computer Science/Oxford Univ.; co-author: The Spy in The Coffee Machine: The End of Privacy as We Know It, 2014), chairman of the Open Data Institute, and Hampson, an economist who has implemented technological change in the public sector, examine our lives as “digital apes” in a “super-fast and hyper-complex interconnected world of immensely powerful devices.” Recalling the “utter interdependence of Homo sapiens and tools, each shaping the other over the millennia,” and the rise of AI, the authors offer a leisurely, engaging account of our present digital landscape, explaining how mathematically driven technologies affect us every day. Algorithms, they write, run “significant parts of our lives.” The authors range widely, covering robotics, gene editing, “social machines” (Wikipedia, etc.), the rise of giant tech companies, and AI and the world of work, and they find both challenges and opportunities. Rich in ideas and insights, the book is especially strong on our growing personal relationships with Alexa and other robots. “We are optimists,” write the authors, dismissing predictions of machines running amok in the streets: “It will be a long time before people have to worry about self-aware AIs, let alone jealous or malevolent ones….[We] are more afraid of what harm natural stupidity, rather than artificial intelligence, might wreak in the next 50 years of gradually more pervasive machines and smartness.” Besides, humans control “the supply of silicon and aluminum and the power switch.” However, the broad population does not manage the tech elites who make digital decisions. “A dozen white American businessmen” dominate the world of AI through “private mega-corporations, extraordinarily rich and answerable only to themselves.” The authors describe the many dangers of mixing digital elites and machines, and they urge readers to remain vigilant and choose wisely.
An upbeat—even reassuring—take on what will be an AI–saturated future.Pub Date: May 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-19-093298-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master.
One of history’s most prolific inventors receives his due from one of the world’s greatest biographers.
Pulitzer and National Book Award winner Morris (This Living Hand and Other Essays, 2012, etc.), who died this year, agrees that Thomas Edison (1847-1931) almost certainly said, “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” and few readers of this outstanding biography will doubt that he was the quintessential workaholic. Raised in a middle-class Michigan family, Edison displayed an obsessive entrepreneurial spirit from childhood. As an adolescent, he ran a thriving business selling food and newspapers on a local railroad. Learning Morse code, he spent the Civil War as a telegrapher, impressing colleagues with his speed and superiors with his ability to improve the equipment. In 1870, he opened his own shop to produce inventions to order. By 1876, he had money to build a large laboratory in New Jersey, possibly the world’s first industrial research facility. Never a loner, Edison hired talented people to assist him. The dazzling results included the first commercially successful light bulb for which, Morris reminds readers, he invented the entire system: dynamo, wires, transformers, connections, and switches. Critics proclaim that Edison’s innovations (motion pictures, fluoroscope, rechargeable batteries, mimeograph, etc.) were merely improvements on others’ work, but this is mostly a matter of sour grapes. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was a clunky, short-range device until it added Edison’s carbon microphone. And his phonograph flabbergasted everyone. Humans had been making images long before Daguerre, but no one had ever reproduced sound. Morris rivetingly describes the personalities, business details, and practical uses of Edison’s inventions as well as the massive technical details of years of research and trial and error for both his triumphs and his failures. For no obvious reason, the author writes in reverse chronological order, beginning in 1920, with each of the seven following chapters backtracking a decade. It may not satisfy all readers, but it works.
Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9311-0
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
A book that describes what kangaroos do and offers unusually beautiful pictures of them doing it. One old male bending forward while scratching his back looks like nothing else found in nature- -except maybe a curmudgeonly old baseball manager with arthritis in the late innings of another losing game (in fact, baseball players would appear to be the only animals who scratch themselves as much as kangaroos do—bellies, underarms, Iwago captures every permutation of scratching). At other times, they look preternaturally graceful and serene. Some of Iwago's (Mitsuaki Iwago's Whales, not reviewed) photographic compositions flirt with anthropomorphism and slyly play to our urge to see ourselves in the animals. But kangaroos are so singular that there's always something about the cant of a head or the drape of a limb that makes you think you flatter yourself that there is any kinship. They remain wondrously different.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8118-0785-1
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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