An accessible, insightful exploration of the history and evolving impact of AI technologies.
How the pursuit of artificial intelligence has unfolded and what it means for humanity.
Technology journalist Olson explores here the pioneering efforts of two CEOs, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, as they have led the development of revolutionary AI technologies. The book tracks their ascent to positions of extraordinary power, along with the gradual erosion of their idealism about the roles they might play in ensuring that the products they helped create would be devoted to ethical aims and the advancement of human welfare. We gain a jarringly clear sense of the radical social and economic changes already being brought about by AI and of at least some of the risks posed by them. Reckless greed and ambition, the author demonstrates, are driving innovation in this immensely lucrative field, and very little regulatory oversight exists to curb dangers that range from economic collapse spurred by the disappearance of industries taken over by machines to the even more sensational prospect of human annihilation at the hands of superintelligent robots. High-tech firms, we learn, have “cut corners and misled the public about their products, putting themselves on course to become highly questionable stewards of AI.” One immediate consequence of such deceptions, rendered vividly in discussions of notorious examples of racist and sexist results generated by AI, is that the technology reproduces the toxic prejudices of the data that trains it. As Olson ominously concludes of Altman and Hassabis: “They joined a long history of innovators who tweaked their ideals to stay in a race and build power. The result is some of the most transformative technology we have ever seen. Now to find out the price.”
An accessible, insightful exploration of the history and evolving impact of AI technologies.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781250337740
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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