A defense of AI weakened by poor arguments and little critical analysis.
Going against the “Gloomers” and “Doomers.”
Reid, the co-founder of LinkedIn, and Beato, a tech and culture writer, aim to dispel the public’s concerns about ceding control to AI systems and to establish trust in AI companies and their methods by showing “what could possibly go right” in AI development. Attempting to persuade readers that industry regulation is undemocratic and inhibits progress, the authors promulgate industry-friendly ideas such as permissionless innovation, iterative development, and risk tolerance. They take issue with AI “Gloomers,” who favor official oversight. They examine the historical context of technological adoption, using examples like the automobile, the power loom, and the printing press to illustrate how new technologies can transform societies. However, the authors don’t entirely prove their case. They frequently make comparisons that are an oversimplification of a complex issue, such as when they write: “Regulation is one way we try to compel certainty, but no regulation can completely eliminate the risk of some unfortunate thing happening.” The authors compare the regulation of Large Language Models (LLMs) used in AI to laws against robbery and professional licensing for doctors and lawyers: “Laws that make robbery a crime aren’t a guarantee that you won’t ever get mugged—they’re simply a policy designed to reduce that possibility.” But these are vastly different domains with distinct risks and regulatory challenges. The authors’ writing suffers from logical fallacies—hyperbole, hasty generalizations, and false dichotomies. At times, the book reads as if it were written by AI—meaning the arguments sound plausible, but may suffer from a biased feedback loop that could have occurred during one of their “endless conversations…with Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini,” which Beato cites using “while drafting this book.” These problems render the book largely sophomoric.
A defense of AI weakened by poor arguments and little critical analysis.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9798893310108
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Authors Equity
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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