Skip to main content

Will AI Replace Us? - Shelly Fan ***

Although a review should largely be about the content of a book - and we'll get onto that - sometimes, the format it is presented in can have such an impact that this comes to the fore. Will AI Replace Us? falls into this category as part of Thames & Hudson's The Big Idea series which makes use of 'Quick recognition text hierarchy'. Throughout the book there are four different font sizes used. The idea is that you can read the biggest two sizes to get an overview in about half an hour, add in the next size down for an hour's quick read, or go the whole hog for a two-hour in-depth read.

It's an interesting concept, but the execution is horrible. The designer seems to have no idea how book pages should be laid out. The text is chunky sans serif - hard on the eyes on paper - and has far too little white space, getting uncomfortably close to the edge of the page and looking like it has been thrown in, rather than carefully set. To make matters worse, there are two other text styles - a tiny one for image captions and another for hypertext-like definitions of phrases (which are heavily highlighted in the text), causing more visual confusion. That attempt at imitating hypertext reflects the reality that this approach would work far better on a web page, where you can have proper hypertext and collapse lower level sections without resorting to eye-crunching text size differences. It just doesn't work well as a book format. It's novel and creative, which is excellent - but a key lesson of creativity is that you will sometimes fail. And this is one of those times.

As for the content on artificial intelligence, it's a mix of so-so history, good on the science, over-enthusiasm about achievements and interesting lengthy consideration of ethics and impacts - the last of which is probably the best.

A couple of examples of iffy history: in the caption for the Science Museum's Difference Engine (rather disappointing it isn't mentioned where it is) we are told it was 'based on Babbage's original drawings of the Analytical Engine' - but, of course the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine were totally different things. The text is also fast and loose with Ada Lovelace's role. We're told 'Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace originated the concept of... the Analytical Engine' - where Lovelace's first involvement was a commentary on someone else's paper on Babbage's idea - there is no basis for the suggestion she was involved in the origination of the design.

Similarly, the early work on expert systems is made to sound like a commercial triumph, talking of the 'dominant success of the first AI boom' and 'AI seemed unstoppable.' It really didn't - it seemed niche and rapidly collapsed. Later we get a lot of material on self-driving cars, which spends some time addressing the societal issues of killing people, but doesn't take on the essential point that the statistical argument of hypothetical lives saved is of little value to the families of those killed. We're told that people's concerns are about a lack of understanding of AI mechanisms, but that's really not what this is about. Nevertheless, along with the descriptions of the technology, the parts of the book focusing on the ethics of AI are the best, engaging the reader in thought about the implications of the technology.

Oddly, the 'future' section seemed one of the most dull, in part because it focussed on medical applications - which tend to be worthy but not something we think of in everyday life terms. Even so, it covered the issues well.

A distinct curate's egg, then. The format is wonderfully creative but really gets in the way of the message. And there are some useful spoonfuls of information in that egg, if you can get past the problems.
Paperback:  
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Degrees of Empathy [The Science of Evil] – Simon Baron-Cohen ***

I’ve been a real fan of previous books by Simon Baron-Cohen like  The Essential Difference , so opening this was one was a pleasant prospect. What I found was a book that wasn’t  bad … but that could have been a lot better. I got the impression of a book that had been rushed out without a lot of work going into it. The thesis at the heart of the book – that one of the important ‘circuits’ of the brain is the one dealing with empathy, and that individuals sit on an empathy spectrum, with some residing at zero degrees of empathy – is an interesting one. Baron-Cohen introduces us to three key personality types he defines as ‘zero-negative’ including psychopaths, plus types that are ‘zero-positive’ like those with Asperger’s. In a way both of these definitions are odd, in that his zero-negatives can actually have a lot of the kind of empathy that involves being able to read another person’s emotional state, and his zero-negatives can have a lot of the kind of empathy i...
Post a Comment
Read more