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
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
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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