David Miles is an infectious disease immunologist who spent ten years researching diseases of childhood in Africa and the vaccinations that protect against them. He now tutors on the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine's online MSc course. David is author of How Vaccines Work and Sneeze: The History and Science of the Common Cold . Why science? I find myself existing in an enormously fascinating and enormously complicated universe. I want to align my understanding of all that complexity with its objective reality, and nobody’s come up with a better way to do that than the scientific method. Why this book? Everybody is familiar with colds and everybody hates them but, after a couple of decades in infectious disease research, I realised I didn’t know much about them. The only people who do are the unsung few who research them. Yet if you mention colds in a bus stop queue, you’ll hear plenty of very firmly held opinions on how to avoid them and how to treat them. I wanted...
As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...