Astute if often oddball insights.
Unsettling thoughts on AI from some big-league thinkers.
The book opens with a worshipful tribute to Kissinger, who died last year at age 100. He apparently thought deeply about this subject and “closely mentored” his two collaborators on the “diplomatic alignment of humans” in their relationship to AI. Kissinger was a prominent Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Eric Schmidt was the chairman and CEO of Google, and Mundie was a chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft. Recognized AI experts, the latter two work hard to avoid repeating themselves. Within the past decade, specialists who have spent their lives warning against comparing a computer to a human brain have changed their minds. AI engineers now agree that they are trying to build something modeled on and superior to the brain without fully understanding it. Human brains are limited by the size of the human skull, but AI can grow without limit. The average AI supercomputer is already 120 million times faster than the human brain. Unlike ordinary computers, its mapping of the world is not programmed but learned. Perhaps in a nod to Kissinger, the book delves heavily into the role of AI in government. Its value lies in its potentially perfect knowledge, but that is a two-edged sword. Faced with a machine that always makes the correct choice, humans and their leaders may object to surrendering their free will, but autocrats may perk up. Readers may scratch their heads at the authors’ conviction that AI builders assume their creation will lead to a golden age of abundance, eliminating poverty, inequality, and the necessity of work. A long section devoted to problems of a life devoted exclusively to leisure contains ingenious solutions, but it’s not a subject that provokes great controversy.
Astute if often oddball insights.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780316581295
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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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