A scholarly framework for regulating AI technology, with an eye toward enhancing choice while promoting the social good.
Two academic specialists look down the road at the evolution of AI and how to control it.
Discussions about how to regulate digital technology are inevitably heated and labyrinthine, with the participants often failing to agree on even the most basic of precepts. Anyone approaching this book with the expectation that Gasser, a professor in technology and social sciences at the Technical University of Munich, and Mayer-Schönberger, a professor of internet governance and regulation at Oxford, will lay out a one-size-fits-all model of regulation will be disappointed. Instead, the authors focus on establishing a conceptual framework that sets clear boundaries while still allowing for innovation and the capacity to change with dynamic circumstances. They use guardrails as an extended metaphor, looking at a wide array of cases, including the European Union’s attempts at tech regulation and the rules governing contributions to Wikipedia. Most attempts to date have shortcomings, but they provide lessons on how to balance competing concerns. Neither tech specialists nor ethicists can understand all the issues, and the proposals put forward by Gasser and Mayer-Schönberger involve collaboration and a willingness to compromise. The authors are wary of the “black boxes” in which AI systems operate, and they believe that handing decision-making power to machines is a dangerous path. An example of unintended consequences is the case where an algorithm rejected mortgage applications because they were made by Black applicants. The designers of algorithms must be able to explain exactly what is happening in an AI “box,” and algorithms need to be constructed to take into account social concerns, with ample provision for human oversight. Gasser and Mayer-Schönberger have interesting things to say about the topic, but the book is a dense, complex read, written with an academic audience in mind.
A scholarly framework for regulating AI technology, with an eye toward enhancing choice while promoting the social good.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780691150680
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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