A wide-ranging, accessible look at AI–related changes that are coming for virtually every profession in the 21st century.
In their debut nonfiction collaboration, Marin and Luka Ivezic, father and son, address the wide range of possibilities and challenges represented by AI.
The authors cite the inroads that AI has made into all aspects of modern life, from the world of investment to the practice of medicine to more mundane things, like everyday finance or automation (self-driving cars, planes that fly and land themselves). They contend that only businesses that have adapted and trained for the inevitable incorporation of AI will survive and thrive. Most likely, there will be no meaningful exceptions: “Even ‘knowledge workers’—engineers, physicians, scientists, lawyers and any other workers who, as business process consultant Thomas Davenport aptly puts it, basically ‘think for a living’—face the likelihood that parts of their current jobs will be automated by AI.” Any reader who’s required in-depth medical diagnostics in the last few years will be able to attest—perhaps uncomfortably—to how extensively this is already true, and likewise, anyone who’s dabbled in investing will know how much of the industry is now conducted by machines. But although the authors here are thorough in their extrapolations of what’s coming, they also seek to reassure their readers. “Are we then headed into a Dark Age where humans will be rendered obsolete?” they ask. “Again, the answer is a resounding, ‘No!’ AI and the other emerging technologies are not a step into a world that says, ‘No humans needed.’ ” The Ivezics expertly articulate the various complex ways AI can mesh with human entrepreneurship, pointing out that human intuition can counterbalance and enhance machine speed and precision specifically because it’s nonquantifiable.
A wide-ranging, accessible look at AI–related changes that are coming for virtually every profession in the 21st century.Pub Date: April 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73274-970-2
Page Count: 257
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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