BOOK REVIEWS

    Three economists, Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb, teamed up to write Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that their book boils down to three foundational insights: New...

P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, authors of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, have a premise that is at once remarkable and patently obvious: social media rules the world — and not for good. As they put it in their introduction: “This is a book about how...

    Remember when our online problems stayed there, reliably separate from our ‘real lives?’ Turns out, those were the good old days. Now we increasingly inhabit a world in which the distinction between online and offline has disappeared. More to the...

    Tom Clancy, James Patterson, or Dan Brown probably wish they’d written the opening sentence of Paul Scharre’s book, Army of None: “On the night of September 26, 1983, the world almost ended.” From there, Scharre tells a truly terrifying tale. It was the height of...

    The title for Byron Reese’s book comes from his contention that, up to now, there have been only three truly transformational technological changes in all of human history. Our first age was defined by the discovery of fire and our development of language. The...

    Predictions about AI and job loss are, like nutrition advice, all over the map. Some pundits are quite pessimistic. Others, noting the net-positive job effects of prior technologies, are entirely optimistic. And, of course, there are the Goldilocks folks occupying...