A must-read, fully-up-to-date report on the holy grail of computing.
Many books proclaim that true artificial intelligence is on the horizon, and this expert overview makes a convincing case that genuine AI is…on the horizon.
New York Times technology correspondent Metz tells his engrossing story through the lives of a dozen geniuses, scores of brilliant men (mostly), and an ongoing, cutthroat industrial and academic arms race. He begins with a history of neural networks, an idea developed in the 1950s when it became clear that sheer calculating speed would never produce a smart computer. A neural network is an engineering system modeled on the web of neurons in the brain. Such systems can be “trained” by passing signals back and forth through multiple layers without being programmed with specific rules. Vastly overhyped, the concept led to few accomplishments—until the 21st century, when massive computer power and breakthroughs by Metz’s heroes have produced spectacular achievements. As the author astutely points out, calling it “artificial intelligence” may be a mistake. Today’s neural nets capable of “deep learning” don’t think, but they’re superb at pattern recognition. They can identify photographs and handwriting and respond with modest sophistication to verbal commands (Siri and Alexa). A computer employing deep learning is not a brain; it requires access to a titanic database and accomplishes a single task. The unbeatable chess player can’t play Jeopardy! That requires a different computer. Despite massive challenges, a handful of mega-companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon) and one mega-nation (China) have no doubts. For Elon Musk, “it was all wrapped up in the same technological trend. First image recognition. Then translation. Then driverless cars.” Then AI. Metz expresses optimism for the next decade but does not pin his hopes on the U.S. The Trump administration’s clampdown on immigration has diverted foreign talent and American investment elsewhere. Meanwhile, China has “built a domestic industry worth more than $150 billion…treating artificial intelligence like its own Apollo program.”
A must-read, fully-up-to-date report on the holy grail of computing.Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4267-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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