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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

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 ...

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...