Astute if often oddball insights.
Unsettling thoughts on AI from some big-league thinkers.
The book opens with a worshipful tribute to Kissinger, who died last year at age 100. He apparently thought deeply about this subject and “closely mentored” his two collaborators on the “diplomatic alignment of humans” in their relationship to AI. Kissinger was a prominent Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Eric Schmidt was the chairman and CEO of Google, and Mundie was a chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft. Recognized AI experts, the latter two work hard to avoid repeating themselves. Within the past decade, specialists who have spent their lives warning against comparing a computer to a human brain have changed their minds. AI engineers now agree that they are trying to build something modeled on and superior to the brain without fully understanding it. Human brains are limited by the size of the human skull, but AI can grow without limit. The average AI supercomputer is already 120 million times faster than the human brain. Unlike ordinary computers, its mapping of the world is not programmed but learned. Perhaps in a nod to Kissinger, the book delves heavily into the role of AI in government. Its value lies in its potentially perfect knowledge, but that is a two-edged sword. Faced with a machine that always makes the correct choice, humans and their leaders may object to surrendering their free will, but autocrats may perk up. Readers may scratch their heads at the authors’ conviction that AI builders assume their creation will lead to a golden age of abundance, eliminating poverty, inequality, and the necessity of work. A long section devoted to problems of a life devoted exclusively to leisure contains ingenious solutions, but it’s not a subject that provokes great controversy.
Astute if often oddball insights.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780316581295
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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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
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