Essential, illuminating reading for those who fear and those who welcome changes that AI may bring.
Powerful AI tools for the medical industry are already shaping our digital shadows, diagnosing disease, recommending treatments, and quietly redefining the doctor-patient relationship.
University of California, San Francisco physician and author Wachter surveys the rapidly changing frontier where algorithms meet anatomy. Drawing on a yearlong exploration of artificial intelligence in health care, he interviews clinicians, developers, ethicists, and policymakers to reveal an industry both hopeful and unsettled. The 2022 debut of ChatGPT unleashed a wave of enthusiasm for machine learning in medicine—promising to ease physicians’ data-entry drudgery and help interpret the oceans of electronic health information. But Wachter finds that despite notable successes, there are cautionary tales of flawed models, opaque “black boxes,” and dangerously overhyped results. Regulation, notes scholar Michelle Mello, remains a “hot mess,” tangled in uncertainty over when an AI “decision support” tool becomes a regulated medical device. Meanwhile, the profit-driven structure of American health care complicates matters further—if an algorithm evaluates a patient and recommends treatment, who gets paid? Wachter is alert to these ethical and financial knots, as well as the potential for tech giants such as Google and Microsoft to exert undue influence disguised as impartial counsel. As one member of Congress warns, allowing tech companies to assess their own or competitors’ AI models invites serious conflicts of interest. Wachter argues that AI tools will offer more help than harm, and that the medical profession’s “professional risk aversion, powerful incumbents, spring-loaded malpractice system, byzantine payment structures, and stringent privacy rules” will be effective guardrails against AI risks. Though the book largely skirts the political battles shaping health care, it is an accessible, often fascinating primer on AI tools changing clinical practice—for better or worse.
Essential, illuminating reading for those who fear and those who welcome changes that AI may bring.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044245
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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