The AI Mirror - Shannon Vallor ****

Some titles tell you nothing about the book itself - but The AI Mirror puts Shannon Vallor's central argument front and centre: that artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI such as ChatGPT, is not intelligence at all, but rather holds a mirror up to our own intelligence. As Vallor points out, your reflection in a mirror certainly looks and acts like you - but it is not a person.

This is a metaphor that works impressively well. It reflects (get it?) the total lack of understanding in systems that are simply reflecting back data from a vast amount of human output. That's not to say that they have no value, but we always have to be aware of their nature and their abilities both to produce errors as a result and to reflect our in-built biases, which we may consciously suppress but nonetheless come through in the data. To quote Vallor, these systems 'aren't designed to be accurate, they are designed to sound accurate'.

What Vallor tells us we have that AI doesn't is 'practical wisdom' or prudence - you might doubt this if you listen to some politicians (say), but the point is that we are able to engage this kind of filter where the AI lacks the ability - and though there can be tinkering at the margins when AIs get things badly wrong, it won't stop them continuing to trip up.

As someone with a science background, I usually find reading philosophy books a real struggle, as they are rarely anything but clear - however Vallor puts forward her arguments in what is usually well-worded, comprehensible English. The only exception is a near-obsessive love of the painful word 'valorize' (I don't know if this is nominative determinism).

One very small moan - Vallor makes use of science fiction parallels and a couple of times refers to a SF source called iRobot - I think this is meant to be Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, not the vacuum cleaner manufacturer.

There is some powerful stuff here, though at one point Vallor notes how we're all becoming poor armchair non-experts in subjects like climate change, a subject she refers to consistently throughout the book despite it not being her subject. But there is one big issue: for me this is the classic 'article stretched to be a book'. The key points are excellent and thought-provoking, but they are all made at length and could have been condensed into far fewer words with more impact. I am, nonetheless giving the book four stars for its readability and central argument.

Hardback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Math for English Majors - Ben Orlin *****

Ben Orlin makes the interesting observation that the majority of people give up on understanding maths at some point, from fractions or algebra all the way through to tensors. At that stage they either give up entirely or operate the maths mechanically without understanding what they are doing. In this light-hearted take, Orlin does a great job of taking on mathematical processes a step at a time, in part making parallels with the structure of language. Many popular maths books shy away from the actual mathematical representations, going instead for verbal approximations. Orlin doesn't do this, but makes use of those linguistic similes and different ways of looking at the processes involved to help understanding. He also includes self-admittedly awful (but entertaining) drawings and stories from his experience as a long-time maths teacher. To make those parallels, Orlin refers to numbers as nouns, operations as verbs (though he points out that there are some flaws in this simile) a

2040 (SF) - Pedro Domingos ****

This is in many ways an excellent SF satire - Pedro Domingos never forgets that part of his job as a fiction writer is to keep the reader engaged with the plot, and it's a fascinating one. There is one fly in the ointment in the form of a step into heavy-handed humour that takes away its believability - satire should push the boundaries but not become totally ludicrous. But because the rest of it is so good, I can forgive it. The setting is the 2040 US presidential election, where one of the candidates is an AI-powered robot. The AI is the important bit - the robot is just there to give it a more human presence. This is a timely idea in its own right, but it gives Domingos an opportunity not just to include some of the limits and possibilities of generative AI, but also to take a poke at the nature of Silicon Valley startups, and of IT mega-companies and their worryingly powerful (and potentially deranged) leaders. Domingos knows his stuff on AI as a professor of computer science w

Shannon Vallor - AI Mirror Interview

Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where she directs the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and former AI Ethicist at Google. She is the author of Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Oxford, 2016) Her latest book is The AI Mirror How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking . Why philosophy? I’m a philosopher because there’s no other area of research that investigates what our knowledge rests on, what justifies our beliefs, values, and choices, what legitimizes the power of the institutions and laws that govern us, what we owe to one another, and how we ought to live in order to flourish together. I have a hard time imagining more important questions to ask right now. Why this book? I’ve been writing about the ethics of artificial

Search This Blog