If you’re worried artificial intelligence is coming for you, read Melanie Mitchell’s new book
According to a Pew survey, 72% of us are “worried” rather than “enthusiastic” about the potential developments in automation.
Count me among the worried, though I am not worried about artificial intelligence coming for my job so much as the unthinking embrace of technology as a “solution” for flawed human behavior. It seems as though there’s a story every day about the failure of a so-called intelligent algorithm, including recent news of the Amazon facial recognition technology, “Rekognition,” “matching” 28 pictures of New England-area pro athletes with a database of police mugshots.
“Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans” by Melanie Mitchell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28).
Mitchell holds a Ph.D. in computer science and is an artificial-intelligence researcher who has worked alongside some of the pioneers of the field, including Douglas Hofstadter, author of the seminal “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.” That book established many of the ground rules for how we discuss issues of computer intelligence and automation.
Algorithms can now compose music that we may call “art,” but as Mitchell points out, those algorithms will always be incapable of appreciating that art.
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