An important and sober investigation of Silicon Valley’s boldest claims about the future.
A skeptical view of grand predictions.
Artificial general intelligence, colonizing Mars, living in a simulation, and immortality are rigorously investigated in this timely and thoughtful book. Becker, an astrophysicist and science journalist, takes a wild ride through speculative technologies and assesses their merit, using real science—testing claims mathematically, scientifically, and through interviews with experts. He concludes that many are neither feasible nor desirable, and some are downright bizarre. For example, he writes, “It’s effectively impossible to put a self-sustaining human civilization on Mars.…The radiation levels are too high, the gravity is too low, there’s no air, and the dirt is made of poison. There are many other problems with this idea, and it’s one of the simpler ones involved in these visions of the future.” What’s striking when reading Becker’s work is why there isn’t more skepticism. According to Becker, it’s because the tech industry is operating under a wave of groupthink, promoting ideas associated with transhumanism, effective altruism, long-termism, extropianism, rationalism, and the singularity. Together, they make up what Becker calls “the ideology of technological salvation,” a worldview “held by many venture capitalists, executives, and other ‘thought leaders’ within the tech industry” that emphasizes technological progress above all else. Becker traces the origins of this ideology to science fiction, including its early racist and authoritarian undertones, and exposes a lack of empathy and ability to deal with reality. He writes: “For a strong longtermist, investing in a Silicon Valley AI company is a more worthwhile humanitarian endeavor than saving lives in the tropics.” The book looks at many of the think tanks, nonprofits, and other institutions promoting these ideas as inevitable. Yet, Becker writes, “this future (or set of futures) doesn’t work.”
An important and sober investigation of Silicon Valley’s boldest claims about the future.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781541619593
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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