A refreshingly contrarian take on AI and the clouds of hyperbole surrounding it.
The bots probably aren’t going to kill you, but they’re probably not going to save you, either.
Linguist Bender and sociologist Hanna, the founders of a merrily debunking podcast about all things AI, write that there’s hoopla aplenty about how AI will make our lives better—or perhaps worse. In an opening salvo, they write, gamely, “each time we think we’ve reached peak AI hype—the summit of bullshit mountain—we discover there’s worse to come.” There are real concerns, of course, especially for people of color, whom AI facial recognition algorithms are altogether too likely to identify as crime suspects and who are likely to be judged risky candidates for pretrial release if they’ve been charged. Those “daily harms being done in its name” are more profound than a feared robot apocalypse, as are other sequelae of AI: the replacement of human workers with machines, the shredding of career tracks with gig work, the collapse of creative industries. (Actually, the authors add, AI probably won’t replace your job, “but it will make your job a lot shittier.”) Those holding that AI promises a shining future for all are selling just as much of a bill of goods as the doomsayers. AI—or, better, its antecedent, machine learning—has done some useful things along the way, the authors allow, but on a relatively modest scale: spell-checking, for instance, and advances in medical image processing. Those who buy into the end-of-the-rainbow stuff are courting trouble, they add, such as a lawyer who let ChatGPT write a brief for him that turned out to be so full of holes as to land him in front of a judge. The con of which they write is more comprehensive still, though, based on errant machine-driven financial speculation, data and IP theft, the deprecation of human skills, and other clear and present dangers.
A refreshingly contrarian take on AI and the clouds of hyperbole surrounding it.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780063418561
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
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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