An accessible, insightful exploration of the history and evolving impact of AI technologies.
How the pursuit of artificial intelligence has unfolded and what it means for humanity.
Technology journalist Olson explores here the pioneering efforts of two CEOs, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, as they have led the development of revolutionary AI technologies. The book tracks their ascent to positions of extraordinary power, along with the gradual erosion of their idealism about the roles they might play in ensuring that the products they helped create would be devoted to ethical aims and the advancement of human welfare. We gain a jarringly clear sense of the radical social and economic changes already being brought about by AI and of at least some of the risks posed by them. Reckless greed and ambition, the author demonstrates, are driving innovation in this immensely lucrative field, and very little regulatory oversight exists to curb dangers that range from economic collapse spurred by the disappearance of industries taken over by machines to the even more sensational prospect of human annihilation at the hands of superintelligent robots. High-tech firms, we learn, have “cut corners and misled the public about their products, putting themselves on course to become highly questionable stewards of AI.” One immediate consequence of such deceptions, rendered vividly in discussions of notorious examples of racist and sexist results generated by AI, is that the technology reproduces the toxic prejudices of the data that trains it. As Olson ominously concludes of Altman and Hassabis: “They joined a long history of innovators who tweaked their ideals to stay in a race and build power. The result is some of the most transformative technology we have ever seen. Now to find out the price.”
An accessible, insightful exploration of the history and evolving impact of AI technologies.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781250337740
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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