Mastering AI
A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A Fortune magazine journalist draws on his expertise and extensive contacts among the companies and scientists at the forefront of artificial intelligence to offer dramatic predictions of AI’s impact over the next decade, from reshaping our economy and the way we work, learn, and create to unknitting our social fabric, jeopardizing our democracy, and fundamentally altering the way we think.
Within the next five years, Jeremy Kahn predicts, AI will disrupt almost every industry and enterprise, with vastly increased efficiency and productivity. It will restructure the workforce, making AI copilots a must for every knowledge worker. It will revamp education, meaning children around the world can have personal, portable tutors. It will revolutionize health care, making individualized, targeted pharmaceuticals more affordable. It will compel us to reimagine how we make art, compose music, and write and publish books. The potential of generative AI to extend our skills, talents, and creativity as humans is undeniably exciting and promising.
But while this new technology has a bright future, it also casts a dark and fearful shadow. AI will provoke pervasive, disruptive, potentially devastating knock-on effects. Leveraging his unrivaled access to the leaders, scientists, futurists, and others who are making AI a reality, Kahn will argue that if not carefully designed and vigilantly regulated AI will deepen income inequality, depressing wages while imposing winner-take-all markets across much of the economy. AI risks undermining democracy, as truth is overtaken by misinformation, racial bias, and harmful stereotypes. Continuing a process begun by the internet, AI will rewire our brains, likely inhibiting our ability to think critically, to remember, and even to get along with one another—unless we all take decisive action to prevent this from happening.
Much as Michael Lewis’s classic The New New Thing offered a prescient, insightful, and eminently readable account of life inside the dot-com bubble, Mastering AI delivers much-needed guidance for anyone eager to understand the AI boom—and what comes next.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fortune journalist Kahn expounds in his shrewd first book on how AI is likely to change art, education, and the workplace. AI can serve as an educational resource for disadvantaged students who might not otherwise have access to help outside the classroom, Kahn contends, describing how the online education platform Khan Academy built an AI tutor designed to emulate the Socratic method. Kahn is levelheaded in his assessment of AI's abilities and shortcomings, suggesting that while the software might assist artists with generating ideas ("The British crime novelist Ajay Chowdhury uses ChatGPT as a brainstorming partner"), it's designed to conform to examples it has previously encountered and thus can't produce anything novel without extensive human input. Addressing AI's limitations in the design and implementation process is critical, Kahn argues. For instance, he details how algorithms built for identifying crime hot spots reflected racial biases in the data the programs were trained on and asserts that such software "must be engineered to explicitly compensate for past racism by specifying equality as a goal alongside predictive accuracy." Striking a balance between bullishness and caution, Kahn sets out a helpful roadmap for harnessing the promise of AI while navigating its perils. The result is one of the more convincing assessments of how AI will transform society.
