A concise, if Pollyannaish, introduction to artificial intelligence.
A tech consultant and entrepreneur surveys the current landscape of artificial intelligence in this primer.
Within two months of its public launch in November 2022, ChatGPT had reached 100 million monthly active users. While many compare the advent of AI to the rise of electricity and automobiles in terms of its societal impact, Meisel observes that AI’s influence is uniquely immediate. Nascent forms of electricity and automobiles required far greater infrastructure in terms of power lines, gas stations, and other logistical necessities; AI can be accessed over wired and wireless connections that already exist, and services like Microsoft Azure offer users powerful computer centers that don’t require the installation of expensive hardware. Meisel explores the rapidity with which AI has already affected culture, industry, and social interactions in this sweeping overview. The volume begins with an introduction to the technology—the opening chapter contextualizes the expansion of AI within the broader history of “faster and cheaper computing power.” The author highlights the rise of cloud computing and the development of new chip technologies, like parallel processing and inference chips. Subsequent chapters provide an accessible synopsis of the ways in which AI systems work, including a lengthy discussion of how deep neural networks—“a model inspired by human neurons in the brain”—imbue AI agents with the abilities of deep learning and complex data processing. After these early chapters have laid out the technical foundations of AI, the bulk of the remaining text addresses specific topics related to its impact (both presently and, speculatively, in the near future) on areas ranging from economics and governance to war and cybersecurity. These sections offer a balanced perspective that outlines both the advantages and concerns of AI adoption. Regarding economics, for instance, Meisel notes that while AI may eliminate jobs in certain areas, it can also enhance the productivity of workers in other sectors. The author acknowledges the well-documented misuses of large language models in creating and disseminating deep fakes and disinformation, but he also suggests that AI systems could be trained to mitigate against bad behavior.
This work offers an accessible, engaging summary of information that’s widely known about AI, offering readers a concise overview in fewer than 150 total pages. The author concludes with an argument about the limitations of AI that defies many mainstream narratives: Per the author, the presumed assumption that we’re rapidly approaching the advent of a “superintelligence” that represents an existential threat to humanity is simply “wrong.” (Meisel contends that AI’s most noticeable impact will be the ways in which conversational digital assistants are integrated into our daily lives.) While skeptics may balk at the author’s dismissiveness of the dangers of AI, the book serves as an effective primer on how AI works and is currently being implemented in places ranging from the boardroom to the battlefield. The text is well researched, backed by ample references to academic sources, and reflective of Meisel’s expertise as an electrical engineer, entrepreneur, and consultant with a doctorate from the University of Southern California and decades of experience in the field of speech recognition technology.
A concise, if Pollyannaish, introduction to artificial intelligence.Pub Date: July 6, 2026
ISBN: 979-8234131553
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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