Robot butlers are not on the horizon, but this is an insightful update on the digital revolution still in progress.
A chronicle of 70 years of progress in artificial intelligence that delivers encouraging news.
Wooldridge, the head of the computer science department at Oxford, emphasizes that AI researchers have spent huge amounts of effort and money and “repeatedly claimed to have made breakthroughs that bring the dream of intelligent machines within reach, only to have their claims exposed as hopelessly overoptimistic. As a consequence, AI has become notorious for boom-and-bust cycles.” As of 2020, computers perform useful tasks that humans find tremendously difficult, but they are not terribly smart. The author reminds readers that a computer is a machine that follows simple instructions rapidly—billions of times faster than a human. Computers can make decisions provided they’re given instructions on how; if they receive proper guidance, they can adjust and learn. Machine learning, an impressive 1990s advance, produced computers that won on Jeopardy! and were able to take the initiative when given an order, beginning with the iPhone app, Siri, in 2010. A fine educator, Wooldridge lays out the problems solved since the end of World War II, illustrating how far we have come and how far we still have to go. Calculating and sorting proved to be easy. After a great effort, computers now play complex board games (e.g., chess), recognize faces in pictures, answer medical questions better than most doctors, and translate words in real time. Impressive progress in driverless cars and automatic captioning for pictures has convinced Wooldridge that further breakthroughs are imminent. As for problems requiring human-level general intelligence—producing genuine art, communicating with a person and understanding—these are far from being solved. Wooldridge shows little sympathy with “scaremongering” about “killer robots,” but he admits that a future with intelligent machines will see profound social changes, which pundits are happy to describe in the full knowledge that predictions are usually wrong.
Robot butlers are not on the horizon, but this is an insightful update on the digital revolution still in progress.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-77074-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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