Good reading for those seeking to navigate the alt-reality world after the singularity.
Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher weigh in on the robotic future.
When thinking of Kissinger in the context of futurology, one might conjure the image of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove; after all, it’s said that he served as the model for the character. Instead, think of the 1983 film War Games, in which young Matthew Broderick nearly touches off thermonuclear war with his computer tinkering. As that latter film showed, AI involves machines learning to think for themselves—and when they do so while lacking “preprogrammed moves, combinations, or strategies derived from human play,” the machines learn by their own rules. This can be good: One AI routine that the authors discuss figured out a new pharmaceutical formula that humans might never have discovered. But there’s a catch, potentially ominous: “The advent of AI obliges us to confront whether there is a form of logic that humans have not achieved or cannot achieve, exploring aspects of reality we have never known and may never directly know.” The book then spins off into an area Kissinger knows best: how AI might be put to work in the realm of national and international security, developing systems that may keep us all safe—or, alternately, that “will be so responsive that adversaries may attempt to attack before the systems are operational.” All this begs the need for international accords on the use of AI, and we must better understand the machines already showing the promise of outstripping some of our mental processes, an understanding that will allow us to “make peace with them and, in so doing, change the world.” Some parts of this policy paper seem to be mere padding, as with the side tour into Kant’s notion of the Ding an sich, but some will be of interest to students of arms control, future battlespaces, and the like.
Good reading for those seeking to navigate the alt-reality world after the singularity.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-27380-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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