Book Reviews

Andy Crouch’s new book The Life We’re Looking For made me cry…twice. In the spirit of full disclosure it’s not uncommon for a movie, play, or even a novel to choke me up but for a non-fiction treatise to bring me to tears is indeed a rare thing. Add to this the fact...

Though Robert Putnam has served since 1979 as dean and then distinguished professor of political science at the Kennedy School at Harvard, most Americans—including me—only became aware of his keen analytical descriptions of U.S society in 2000, when he published...

When my oldest daughter was born prematurely, her life depended for a mercifully short but crucial time on a ventilator. Her lungs needed the help of automation if they ever were to have a chance to breathe on their own. It is a memory that has stayed with me...

Among both those who are giddiest and those who are most terrified about technological change, there’s this phrase that gets thrown around a lot: technological singularity. The singularity, they say, is a point in the future—perhaps the near future?—when global...

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World, by New York Times Technology Reporter Cade Metz is a highly entertaining and enjoyable account of the long back story behind the rise of modern deep learning approaches  (neural networks)...

Masters or Slaves? AI and The Future of Humanity asks a fundamental question in a crucial moment of human civilization. How will AI impact, and finally shape, humanity's future and, mainly, the humanity of the future? The author's background and experience in both...

John Lennox is an emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford University, and often ventures into the intersection of faith and technology. In this book Lennox offers an overview of AI in order to establish a framework for discussion, then ventures into the promises...

First there was SUNY Professor and sociologist Virginia Eubanks’ 2018 ground-breaking book, Automating Inequality, which spotlighted how even well-intentioned technology solutions to complex social needs often only spawn new problems. Now Princeton sociologist Ruha...

How might Christians engage and bring hope to a world where we have a loneliness epidemic? Three Pieces of Glass addresses this as a crisis of belonging. As expressed in the iconic show Cheers, “you want to go where everybody knows your name.” The book is laid out in...

Everything happens for a reason, of course, but when humans look back on history, they tend to sort events into the inevitable and the arbitrary. It’s easier to fantasize about the latter, and the fantasies that last longest stem from the historical events that feel...

If you have ever wondered how to look at Artificial Intelligence (AI) from the perspective of Christian faith, The Age of AI is definitely a book you will want to read. AI and Faith Founding Member Jason Thacker takes the reader on a journey filled with Bible...

And the winner by acclamation in the nonfiction ‘Holy Crap! I May Never Be Able To Sleep Again!’ category is Sandworm by Andy Greenberg. And, yes, Greenberg’s tale of cyberwar over the past decade is absolutely that terrifying. Here’s how his book begins: On June 27,...

American democracy has persisted for almost 250 years. This despite a couple of world wars, the Great Depression, multiple presidential assassinations and, of course, a civil war. Our democracy has been sufficiently robust to take these various disruptions, cataclysmic as they were, more or less in stride.

“What if we succeed?” Specifically, what happens if we, the AI scientists of the world, succeed in building ever-smarter, ever-more-capable machines, eventually rivaling or surpassing the intelligence of humans? Will the world be better off, or worse? That’s the...

Two buttoned-down AI scientists and a ‘can’t we all just get along?’ hippie walk into a bar . . .

OK, please forgive the click-bait opening sentence, but after reading these two very different books about the very same subject, I couldn’t help myself.

Leaders in both tech and government will be talking about this book, and grappling with it, for a very long time. And it often surprises — not because its opinions are startling, but because hearing them from a tech leader is so uncommon.

In The Big Nine, Amy Webb visits the AI-driven near-future world to which nine tech titans — and two governments — are together giving birth. More precisely, Webb projects three future scenarios for how AI development is likely to play out. Only one — and clearly the...