Although sometimes too abstruse, this is mostly a surprisingly lucid introduction to techniques that are making computers...
A nonmathematical yet still somewhat technical explanation of how researchers are going about achieving artificial intelligence.
This is not another cheerful or alarming exercise in futurology. Science writer Mitchell (Computer Science/Portland State Univ.; Complexity: A Guided Tour, 2011, etc.) begins by wondering if an intelligent machine would “require us to reverse engineer the human in all its complexity or is there a shortcut, a clever set of yet unknown algorithms, that will produce what we recognize as full intelligence.” She then explains what researchers have done so far. Beginning in the 1950s, when success seemed just around the corner, there was symbolic AI, which involved programmers using symbols that humans could understand to solve straightforward logical problems. This led to “expert systems,” which used massively detailed instructions to make decisions in narrow fields such as disease diagnosis better than human experts. By the 1980s, the limitations of AI became more obvious. Today, concepts such as “deep learning,” relying on artificial neural networks, evaluate information without following rigid instructions. Despite the name and hype (and accomplishments—e.g., being unbeatable at Jeopardy), machine and human learning are not comparable. Highly advanced computers are “trained” by immense inputs, made possible only with the advent of 21st-century “big data.” After evaluating their outputs, programmers retrain them to improve their accuracy. Like humans, they are not perfect. Mitchell maintains that true superintelligence will not happen until machines acquire human qualities such as common sense and consciousness. These are nowhere in sight despite recent spectacular advances—in translation, facial recognition, etc.—and the author believes that this absence makes it unlikely that one anticipated breakthrough, true driverless cars, will happen any time soon. “It’s worth remembering,” she writes, “that the first 90 percent of a complex technology project takes 10 percent of the time and the last 10 percent takes 90 percent of the time.”
Although sometimes too abstruse, this is mostly a surprisingly lucid introduction to techniques that are making computers smarter.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-25783-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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