Kahn is a reliable guide through the AI minefield, assessing the pros and cons in a plainspoken, fair-minded way.
An experienced tech journalist examines the current AI landscape and highlights the need for careful design decisions and robust governance structures.
Kahn, who reports on emerging technologies for Fortune magazine, brings a great deal of expertise to this discussion of artificial intelligence, but his book is not a how-to manual on using AI. Rather, the author surveys the challenges that it presents to society as a whole. He identifies the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in late November 2022 as the “light bulb event.” The difference between this system and its precursors was the capacity for conversational interaction, heralding a true breakthrough in the development of the technology and its adoption by people with limited technical expertise. Kahn explores the significant advantages that AI can bring—in business, education, health, environmental management, and even warfare. However, for every advantage, there are plenty of worrying downsides. AI could create powerful new medicines, but it could also lead to terrible bioweapons. It could expand educational possibilities, but it could also, especially because of its writing ability, degrade the human ability to think creatively and empathetically. The time to work out these questions is within the next few years, writes Kahn. This view makes obvious sense, but the key weakness of the book is how to actually come up with and implement “Goldilocks” solutions. The author suggests a role for government, but so far, political institutions have not been effective in dealing with technological issues. Kahn hints that a social consensus could form to place limits on AI development, but that seems more hopeful than realistic. Still, the author provides a solid analysis of the issues coming down the road, suitable for specialists as well as general readers.
Kahn is a reliable guide through the AI minefield, assessing the pros and cons in a plainspoken, fair-minded way.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668053324
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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