I’m a storyteller writing on business and technology. I specialize in clear views of complex systems. When Juliette showed me her research on tech companies and AI responsibility, I saw the power of a book – the book that ultimately became The AI Dilemma. The core dilemma is that in the right hands the technology is needed, and in the wrong hands it’s dangerous. When Juliette asked me to coauthor it, I jumped at the chance. As we worked, I realized that the topic brought into focus all the research and thinking I’d ever done about human, organizational, and machine behavior.
I wrote...
The AI Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology
Generative content creators. Self-driving vehicles. Predictive analytics. In the right hands, they’re beneficial to all. In the wrong hands, they amplify human bias, enable dangerous frauds, and harm vulnerable people.
Juliette Powell and I wrote The AI Dilemma to help decision-makers make sense of their choices in business and daily life. The technology (often unintentionally) puts people at risk. Software engineers, business leaders, governments, and social justice activists are already grappling with this. We explain their logic and tell their stories – and show what it takes to use AI to gain real control, not the illusion of control. The tech is a mirror to humanity. It is forcing us to confront our worst and become our best.
If ever a subject deserved the sweeping hand of a highly skilled journalist/historian, it’s generative AI and machine learning. The field is shaped by its founders’ idiosyncratic and fascinating personalities.
NYTimes reporter Cade Metz observed many events first-hand. We read about Go Grandmaster Lee Sedol recovering from losing to Google’s AI by mastering the machine’s logic. We see Geoffrey Hinton flying supine because of his back problems, and the origins of Joy Buolamwini’s famous Gender Shades project.
We get the backstory to the most serious issues: like how well can AI developers be trusted to manage risk? As a journalist-historian myself, I deeply appreciate being immersed in contemporary history.
'This colourful page-turner puts artificial intelligence into a human perspective . . . Metz explains this transformative technology and makes the quest thrilling.' Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs ____________________________________________________
This is the inside story of a small group of mavericks, eccentrics and geniuses who turned Artificial Intelligence from a fringe enthusiasm into a transformative technology. It's the story of how that technology became big business, creating vast fortunes and sparking intense rivalries. And it's the story of breakneck advances that will shape our lives for many decades to come - both for good and for ill. ________________________________________________
Remember How to Lie With Statistics? Here is: How to abuse big data. And how to stop the abuse.
O’Neil is a good corrective for my own habit of seeing all sides. A former math professor and quant, she is harsh on AI because it systematically punishes the vulnerable and impoverished – and because companies resist change and manipulate the laws to keep their profits.
“Right now, the burden of proof is on us,” she told Juliette and me in an interview, “to prove that these algorithms harm us. I want that burden to be on the companies who profit from using them.” Weapons of Math Destruction argues that we can and should hold the perpetrators – including some of the world’s biggest tech companies – accountable.
'A manual for the 21st-century citizen... accessible, refreshingly critical, relevant and urgent' - Financial Times
'Fascinating and deeply disturbing' - Yuval Noah Harari, Guardian Books of the Year
In this New York Times bestseller, Cathy O'Neil, one of the first champions of algorithmic accountability, sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life -- and threaten to rip apart our social fabric.
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives - where we go to school, whether we get a loan, how much we pay for insurance - are being made…
This is the book I suggest to people who worry that AI will take their jobs or control the world.
These U of Toronto economists make a case for AI as a disruptor of systems and power structures – not on their own, but because of the decision makers who control them. Those companies won’t necessarily be Alphabet, Amazon, or Meta. Their competitive advantage – access to data – will now be available cheaply.
It’s judgment that’s at a premium now. After reading this, I feel pretty trusting of AI. I’m just not so sure about people.
Disruption resulting from the proliferation of AI is coming. The authors of the bestselling Prediction Machines can help you prepare.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has impacted many industries around the world-banking and finance, pharmaceuticals, automotive, medical technology, manufacturing, and retail. But it has only just begun its odyssey toward cheaper, better, and faster predictions that drive strategic business decisions. When prediction is taken to the max, industries transform, and with such transformation comes disruption.
What is at the root of this? In their bestselling first book, Prediction Machines, eminent economists Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb explained the simple yet…
Another classic, which influenced my book. Ron is the founder of RiskThinking AI, which focuses on the financial effects of climate change.
His fascinating stories include one of the first fatalities from self-driving cars, when it struck a woman with a bicycle running to cross the road. Any human driver would have seen an uncertain image and slowed down, playing out a group of possible scenarios. But AI hasn’t learned that kind of humility.
Eventually, when it does, the machines and people will learn how to manage risk together, and that will lead to more courage. The best part of this book is his insight into how the use of new technology changes human behavior.
Our age of radical uncertainty requires a new way of assessing risk that pays more attention to the extreme outliers that too often become tomorrow’s reality.
Today’s models cannot cope with the frightening new unpredictable risks we face every day that frequently seem to come out of left field – the effects of climate change, a killer pandemic, a cascading wildfire, a financial crisis triggered by faceless algorithms, or a devastating cyber-attack that shuts down the electric power grid.
This accessible book advocates a new, more realistic approach to analyzing risk and strategizing—one that is less reliant on a single…
Ten Visions for Our Future took a long time to read – and was worth it. Each of these futures is an immersion in a way of life that the technology makes possible.
Kai-fu Lee is an AI legend in the US (Google and Apple) and China; Stanley Chan (Qiufan’s other name) is a haunting, award-winning science fiction writer who portrays the personal impact of machine technology. Their stories stayed with me, because they go so far beyond the usual scenarios and have such emotional depth.
People are struggling not with an impersonal robotic technology, but with intensely personal worlds that leave them frightened, lonely, hopeful, and unsure of whom to trust. The tech leads them – as it will lead us – across the emotional thresholds of the future.
A WALL STREET JOURNAL, WASHINGTON POST, AND FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
In this ground-breaking blend of imaginative storytelling and scientific forecasting, a pioneering AI expert and a leading writer of speculative fiction join forces to answer an imperative question: How will artificial intelligence change our world within twenty years?
AI will be the defining development of the twenty-first century. Within two decades, aspects of daily human life will be unrecognizable. AI will generate unprecedented wealth, revolutionize medicine and education through human-machine symbiosis, and create brand new forms of communication and entertainment. In liberating us from routine work,…
Gabrielle found her grandfather’s diaries after her mother’s death, only to discover that he had been a Nazi. Born in Berlin in 1942, she and her mother fled the city in 1945, but Api, the one surviving male member of her family, stayed behind to work as a doctor in a city 90% destroyed.
Gabrielle retraces Api’s steps in the Berlin of the 21st century, torn between her love for the man who gave her the happiest years of her childhood and trying to come to terms with his Nazi membership, German guilt, and political responsibility.
Api's Berlin Diaries: My Quest to Understand My Grandfather's Nazi Past
"This is not a book I will forget any time soon."
Story Circle Book Reviews
Moving and provocative, Api's Berlin Diaries offers a personal perspective on the fall of Berlin 1945 and the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich.
After her mother's death, Robinson was thrilled to find her beloved grandfather's war diaries-only to discover that he had been a Nazi.
The award-winning memoir shows Api, a doctor in Berlin, desperately trying to help the wounded in cellars without water or light. He himself was reduced to anxiety and despair, the daily diary his main refuge. As Robinson retraces Api's…
