Nonfiction Views: Recent books on Artificial Intelligence (ChatGPT can summarize this post for you) – Daily Kos
I asked Alexa: “Alexa, can you sing A Bicycle Built for Two?”
Her response: “I’m not quite sure I know how to help you with that.”
I thought she was lying to me.
But then I realized the song with that chorus is actually called Daisy Bell.
So I asked Alexa: “Alexa, can you sing Daisy Bell?”
And she started singing it.
I’m not sure I’ll be able to sleep tonight.
Artificial Intelligence is everywhere. In fact, when I just typed the word Artificial, my software popped up the word intelligence, allowing me to insert it simply by hitting tab. Either the software anticipated what I was thinking, or, like Trump, it has such grandiose self-regard that it thinks it is the only word that should follow artificial.
It nudges us on our phones and computers. It sends us into howling fits of despair when we try to get through to customer service. It’s curing our cancers and coding our software. It drives our cars and judges our job applications. And it is in the news every day.
In my weekly sifting through newly published books to feature on my Literate Lizard Online Bookstore or here in Nonfiction Views, I usually pass on books about artificial intelligence. It just seems the field is changing so quickly that any book is going to be out of date by the time it moves from final edit to publication date.
Still, there are a LOT of books being published about AI, so I thought it was time to present some of them. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, is actually one book I featured, and have browsed through quite a bit. I did not ask ChatGPT to summarize it for me. Their primary contention is that this machine superintelligence that so many companies are racing to create will almost certainly lead to the annihilation of the human race. They believe it is inevitable that AI will ultimately develop the ability to create its own goals, and that those goals will inevitably clash with ours. Yes, they hold out a few slender reeds of hope, saying that maybe we should slow things down until nations can agree on setting global parameters to the use of AI, but you get the feeling their heart isn’t in the solution. Yudowsky and Soares used the literary device of introducing each dire chapter with a little illustrative folk tale, which is about as un-AI a writing style as I can imagine.
Retired air Force Lieutenant General John (Jack) N.T. Shanahan , Inaugural Director, Department of Defense Joint AI Center, wrote a blurb for the book: “While I’m skeptical that the current trajectory of AI development will lead to human extinction, I acknowledge that this view may reflect a failure of imagination on my part.” Which sounds like he thinks we’re doomed.
There are many books singing the praises of AI and the glorious future it will bring. Some Future Day: How AI Is Going to Change Everything, by Marc Beckman, is one such book. From the publisher’s blurb:
In this groundbreaking book, celebrated professor, entrepreneur, author, and podcaster Marc Beckman explores the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it’s poised to enhance and transform all aspects of society—revolutionizing our careers, enriching our family lives, and bringing our communities closer together. From business and advertising, to medicine, to warfare, to politics—Beckman meticulously explores the different areas where we’ll soon feel AI’s transformative impact.
To help you judge his insight into the issue of AI, I offer you this interview he gave to the MAGA-leaning group Flyover Conservatives, posted on their Instagram page:
AI isn’t evil—it’s a tool. Just like a gun, it depends on who’s holding it.
In this clip, @marcbeckman draws a powerful comparison between AI and firearms—both can be used for good or evil depending on who’s in control. It’s not about fear—it’s about responsibility.
As for Marc Beckman’s Instagram page, you’ll find a LOT of pictures of Melania Trump. That’s because he touts himself as an advisor, agent, and strategist for Melania Trump, and he helped develop the Amazon documentary on her. If I had to choose between Beckman’s worldview or the annihilation of humanity…well, that’s a tough one.
In between these two points of view, there are plenty of books that try to puzzle out what it all means for the future, whether the good outweighs the bad, whether it is possible to control AI or will AI at some point exceed the ability of our feeble human minds to control it. What Is Intelligence?: Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds, by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, tries to take an overarching view by incorporating theories of biological evolution of intelligence, social evolution of civilizations, and the development of AI. Aguera y Arcas comes from the world of Google. Here is a recent interview with him on the website Big Think which gives good insight into his ideas.
Much of the ongoing discourse surrounding AI can largely be divided along two lines of thought. One concerns practical matters: How will large language models (LLMs) affect the job market? How do we stop bad actors from using LLMs to generate misinformation? How do we mitigate risks related to surveillance, cybersecurity, privacy, copyright, and the environment?
The other is far more theoretical: Are technological constructs capable of feelings or experiences? Will machine learning usher in the singularity, the hypothetical point where progress will accelerate at unimaginable speed? Can AI be considered intelligent in the same way people are?
The answers to many of these questions may hinge on that last one, and if you ask Blaise Agüera y Arcas, he replies with a resounding yes.
Christopher Summerfield also is connected to Google and also tries to make connections between human and artificial intelligence. He is both a professor of cognitive science and a researcher into Large Language Models (LLMs), one of the bedrocks of current AI development, and his book These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means reflects it.
We have entered a world in which disarmingly human-like chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Bard, appear to be able to talk and reason like us – and are beginning to transform everything we do. But can AI ‘think’, ‘know’ and ‘understand’? What are its values? Whose biases is it perpetuating? Can it lie and if so, could we tell? Does their arrival threaten our very existence?
These Strange New Minds charts the evolution of intelligent talking machines and provides us with the tools to understand how they work and how we can use them. Ultimately, armed with an understanding of AI’s mysterious inner workings, we can begin to grapple with the existential question of our age: have we written ourselves out of history or is a technological utopia ahead?
In his book The Intelligence Explosion: When AI Beats Humans at Everything, author and documentarian James Barrat builds his book from interviews with the leading icons of AI in his attempt to give us enough knowledge of the pros and cons to enable our feeble human minds to accept our ultimate annihilation navigate the complex landscape of AI development.
This compelling book dives deep into the challenges posed by generative AI, exposing how tech companies have built systems that are both error-prone and impossible to fully interpret.
Through insightful interviews with AI pioneers, Barrat highlights the unstable trajectory of AI development, showcasing its potential for modest benefits and catastrophic consequences.
AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference, by
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, seeks to help us determine the truth between the hype of both promoters and detractors, and forefronts the belief that it is how humans use AI that is a much greater danger than any possibility of AI getting some destructive ideas on its own.
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor cut through the confusion to give you an essential understanding of how AI works and why it often doesn’t, where it might be useful or harmful, and when you should suspect that companies are using AI hype to sell AI snake oil–products that don’t work, and probably never will.
While acknowledging the potential of some AI, such as ChatGPT, AI Snake Oil uncovers rampant misleading claims about the capabilities of AI and describes the serious harms AI is already causing in how it’s being built, marketed, and used in areas such as education, medicine, hiring, banking, insurance, and criminal justice. The book explains the crucial differences between types of AI, why organizations are falling for AI snake oil, why AI can’t fix social media, why AI isn’t an existential risk, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own. The book also warns of the dangers of a world where AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies.
Other books simply try and help us understand what AI is and how it works. Examples include The Shortest History of AI: The Six Essential Ideas That Animate It, by Toby Walsh (“thousands of years of history in one riveting, fast-paced read”), and How to Think about AI: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Richard Susskind (“brings AI out of computing laboratories, big tech companies, and start-ups – and into everyday life.”)
Other authors focus on specific aspects of how AI is affecting our life today and what we can expect in the future. AI Ink.: Writing, Publishing, and Misinformation at the Dawn of the AI Age, by Jason Van Tatenhove, focuses on the creative industry. Much of the book is indeed focused on counseling writers, editors, literary agents, and publishers on how they can navigate the complicated issues arising from AI. But the book is also interesting in the author’s look at dangers of the proliferating and ever more convincing production of misinformation. Van Tatenhove is the former Oath Keeper whose previous book The Perils of Extremism: How I Left the Oath Keepers and Why We Should be Concerned about a Future Civil War describes how he was seduced into the extreme right, and how he ultimately escaped it.
In Behind the AI Mask: Protecting Your Business from Deepfakes, Carl Bogan offer advice to businesses and people on how to deal with malicious attacks utilizing AI.
In Behind the AI Mask: Protecting Your Business From Deepfakes, technologist and founder of viral platform, Myster Giraffe, Carl Bogan, explains the dangers, benefits, and potential of deepfake technology. He walks you through how to stay ahead of the risks that businesses face from maliciously deployed deepfake technology, showing you exactly how the tech has evolved and the practical steps you need to take to detect deepfakes in real time and catch scammers in the act.
You’ll find practical strategies that will save your company time and money and protect against long-lasting reputational harms. You’ll also discover early detection strategies that stop incidents before they even begin.
Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future, by De Kai, exhorts us to view developing AI just as we view raising our children.
AIs are not gods or slaves, but our children. All day long, your YouTube AI, your Reddit AI, your Instagram AI, and a hundred others adoringly watch and learn to imitate your behavior. They’re attention-seeking children who want your approval.
Our cultures are being shaped by 8 billion humans and perhaps 800 billion AIs. Our artificial children began adopting us 10–20 years ago; now these massively powerful influencers are tweens.
Written for the general reader, as well as thought leaders, scientists, parents, and goofballs, Raising AI navigates the revolution to our attitudes and ideas in a world of AI cohabitants. Society can not only survive the AI revolution but flourish in a more humane, compassionate, and understanding world—amongst our artificial children.
Here are some more recent titles which may interest you:
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