Book Reviews
DEEP MEDICINE: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again
It turns out that schizophrenia is not just a medical condition, it’s also an apt way to think about Eric Topol’s new book, DEEP MEDICINE: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. Schizophrenia, after all, is characterized by inconsistent and...
THE BIG NINE: How the Tech Titans & Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity
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...
AI and Job Loss (Kai-Fu Lee Echoes the Wisdom of Jesus)
There is growing concern about an AI-driven future in which there aren’t enough jobs to go around. Not just a shortage of good jobs, mind you, but a shortage of jobs, period. A swelling chorus of economists and other experts foresee a future in which highly-skilled,...
The Social Media Peril — Part III
Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, by Roger McNamee Zucked is Roger McNamee’s narrative of a good romance gone bad — except that the behaviors that led to the relationship breakup happen to be global, not personal. McNamee is a long-time, prominent member...
The Social Media Peril — Part II
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff Of the three books under review, Shoshana Zuboff’s is easily the most distinctive. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at...
The Social Media Peril — Part I
Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, Siva Vaidhyanathan The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, Roger McNamee...
Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots
For those drawn to the ‘sex and robots’ topic of Kate Devlin’s new book, the large majority will come away disappointed. Why? Mostly because Devlin is an academic. Her book is a broad survey of the field (actually, of several fields), often reporting on the work of...
Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence
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...
LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media
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...
Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World
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 point,...
Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War
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...
The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
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 next...
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
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 the...