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Artificial Communication - Elena Esposito ****

Sometimes, you read a book where the content is so interesting and important that it's necessary to disregard the fact that it's not a great piece of writing - this is such a book. The fundamental point being made here is that the concept of 'artificial intelligence' is mislabelled. What a smart speaker or AlphaGo or an autonomous vehicle does has nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligence implies understanding - but the algorithms of AI have no understanding of the data they handle. Instead, sociology professor Elena Esposito suggests, what they are capable of is artificial communication.

We see this most clearly with those smart speakers, or voice assistants on smartphones. I ask Siri a question and she responds - it is a form of conversation, and one that mimics intelligence, but it is based on something totally different from understanding. The same can be said when using a search engine. These are no longer mere indexes - we ask them questions and they reply with answers. But even in a less obvious application, there is a form of conversation going on between the AI and its environment - enabling it to carry out actions that in a human require intelligence, but don't in the way that the software/hardware is implemented.

For me, this is absolutely fascinating - a necessary adjunct to reading about AI to understand its limitations and how to deal with those limitations better. That's why the book gets four stars. Unfortunately, though, it would have been a lot better if Esposito had taken on a co-author. The text is highly repetitive, making some points repeatedly, and that's in a book that's already short at 111 pages before hitting the notes.  It is also frustratingly vague. Many of the aspects of AI it talks about are covered in a broad, high level fashion without clear examples. The writing sometimes has the feeling of the kind of soft (indeed, squidgy) social science paper that was the target of the Sokal hoax.

The worst example is a chapter on data visualisation and visual text analysis which does not contain a single specific example. The only illustration in the whole chapter (indeed, pretty much the only one in the whole book) is a picture of a house to illustrate the high bandwidth of a picture. But in a chapter crying out for some actual visualisations (and more of an explanation of what digital text analysis actually does with clear examples) there is no assistance for the reader.

Frustrating in some ways, then, but a book I still heartily recommend because the topic itself is so illuminating, even if the approach taken sadly isn't. We can't expect every academic to be a great writer - many aren't - but when that's the case, a much better book could have been produced if they had paired up with a professional.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here
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