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

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are
Post a Comment
Read more

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied),  the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i
Post a Comment
Read more

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re
Post a Comment
Read more