WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT AI

A debut author and technologist surveys the present landscape, and potential, of artificial intelligence.

The national conversation surrounding AI, writes author Wang, “remains a manic seesaw between glee and terror.” Compounding the confusion is that the most informed sources on AI are riddled with technical jargon and buried in academic publications. In response, Wang offers readers a thorough, yet decisively nontechnical work (readers looking for in-depth discussions of loss functions or tanh activations can look elsewhere). Divided into three parts, the book’s opening chapters place AI within a larger historical context of technologies that have disrupted now obsolete professions while opening new avenues elsewhere. The rise of the computer in the 1950s, for example, eliminated a range of logistics and navigation jobs that relied on human computations. But by the 2020s, almost a quarter of all jobs in the U.S. were in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Rather than closing off workers’ access to jobs, the computer created entirely new fields of expertise. This favorable tradeoff, per the author’s reading of history, is the story of technological leaps writ large: It’s almost always a net positive. Part Two is more pragmatic and surveys the practical applications of AI, both in the present and potentially in the future. The final section makes the case that “the rise of AI will likely increase the value of our very humanity.” Given demographic trends, AI will be essential, per the author’s cogent argument, in supplementing the vital work of electrical and electronics engineers, for example. While the tone of the volume is generally positive towards AI, its nuanced approach acknowledges the role of the technology as a force that “will disrupt” not only the workforce, but multiple facets of human life from armed warfare to the workforce. Wang, who has been involved with AI for more than a decade through work with Google and as a venture capitalist, supports his argument with 350-plus research endnotes.

A well-researched, balanced, and optimistic case for the future of AI.