GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Kaplan presents a comprehensive overview of artificial intelligence, discussing its promise and potential dangers.

The author, an adjunct lecturer at Stanford University, believes that artificial intelligence technology is poised to usher in a “new Renaissance” and catalyze a transformation as revolutionary as those that followed “the wheel, the printing press, the light bulb, and penicillin.” In splendidly accessible language, Kaplan focuses his attention on the future ramifications of generative artificial intelligence (GAI), which can respond to questions in plain language by drawing from massive pools of data to make remarkably fast and precise analytical judgments. According to the author, over time, GAI will not only learn and compute faster and more autonomously; it will also be able to learn directly from actual experience. As the technology inevitably improves, Kaplan posits, AI will remake entire industries. For example, GAI tools will be able to generate legal documents and contracts without a lawyer’s assistance and will find legal precedents with astonishing speed. Kaplan observes that, ironically, the profession largely responsible for the birth of GAI, software engineering, will be a victim of its own progeny. “I’ll telegraph this short and sweet: software engineering, as it’s practiced today, is dead. In the future, everyone will be a programmer. Computer programs, already ubiquitous, will drop in cost to almost zero, and proliferate dramatically.” The scope of Kaplan’s study, especially given its brevity, is impressively expansive—he discusses not only the implications of GAI for employment in several industries, but also the legal and philosophical disputes that will necessarily arise. The philosophical discussions are the weakest aspect of the book; in these instances, Kaplan’s penchant for abridgment is a vice (at one point, discussing the complexities of free will, he enthusiastically refers readers to Wikipedia). However, this remains a wonderfully edifying overview, one that includes a remarkably clear explanation of the technology itself and the manner in which GAI can be said to engage in “thinking.”

An excellent single-volume synopsis of an important and technically formidable subject.