It's not every day that a book you're about to read announces that a new epoch has begun. This book does exactly that, then it backs up that claim with concrete examples of how this happened without your being aware of it. The epoch will probably be called the age of artificial intelligence, or “The AI Age” for short.
The first concrete example is a program that plays chess at the highest level possible. This program isn't the one you heard about years ago that finally was able to consistently beat chess grandmasters. Though that was a milestone, it wasn't an epoch-making one. This AI program beat the most powerful chess-winning programs, and not by just a little. The victories were complete blowouts. What's more, the chess experts who analyzed the program's moves were at a loss to figure out how it won. This book explains how this computer was trained to play chess differently.
A second contrete example is a program that discovered a new drug, Halicin, that can be used to treat patients infected with one of several bacteria strains that resist treatment with other anti-bacteria drugs. Without this AI program. the cost would have been way too high. There was only one molecule that had the unique properties necessary to be effective.
Still another example was an AI-style program that Google used to find how to cut its cooling costs for its ultra-powerful servers that it uses. Expert engineers had already improved energy-efficiency to the best of their ability. AI found ways to cut Google's another 40%.
The chess AI doesn't affect many ordinary people. The Halicin AI also will affect a relatively few, albeit with life-saving potential. But a cost-saving AI would benefit a much greater proportion of the general population.
However, its benefits are only half the story of AI. Risks are also present – risks so dire that they threaten to scuttle AI's rise to prominence. Indeed, the book's main thrust is how we might control the risks so that we can harvest AI's benefits as fully and safely as possible. A lot of thorny problems remain to be solved – which the book describes – before that can happen.
The book isn't perfect. It has three authors. This seems to have resulted, at times, in more repetition than necessary, though at other times it gives greater perspective on various aspects of AI. The book has a heavy overlay of philosophical musings about how AI has given glipses into a here-before hidden nature of reality. I found some of these philosophical discussions hard to grasp, especially those that reference Immanual Kant whose writings always seem to be unable to penetrate through my incomprehension.
Quite a bit of the book seems written for policy managers in business, government and universities, but there is enough directed at a general audience, including myself, to attract our attention. I'm glad of this because general audiences have a huge influence on policies by virtue of our election choices, our purchase choices, our school attendances, and our classroom interactions. All of these will shape the world going forward.
(This review is of the Kindle 2021 edition which has an afterword that covers new developments into 2022.)
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kernel32
Authoritative and noteworthy
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 3, 2021
