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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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