Many Books About AI; or, I like my job

You may have heard about this thing, ChatGPT? No? Well, clearly we don’t talk as often as we used to or you’d be rolling your eyes right now. Oh the suffering of my family and book club friends when it comes to another instance of Erin-talks-about-AI-and-how-it-is-changing-everything. Note: I’m not making a value judgement about AI, just that it might be worth spending a minute thinking about it. And you know, for someone who likes to work, my job of late has been AI things and so I have read a book or two on the subject. And found myself extremely far behind in posting about those books, so here you go: a whirlwind tour.

God Human Animal Machine by Meghan O’Gieblyn – Recommended on the Ezra Klein show and a fantastic (really) consideration of theology, artificial intelligence, and what it means (or doesn’t mean) to be human. If the human argument about what has separated us from animals has been ‘intelligence,’ and now the argument for what separates us from robot machines is ’emotive bodily feeling’ then… well, that’s the premise of this excellent book.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell – I read this book not once, but thrice (thrice!) in the last six months for its accessible and patient explanations of the history of artificial intelligence and its current technological underpinnings. Light on the impact of the technology on the future of humanity (which is fine!) the book does a thorough and accessible account of what you need to know about how AI works such that you can hold a reasonably intelligent conversation about it (or at least – and don’t tell M. – enough that people *think you get it).

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman – I don’t know about this one. To be fair I listened to it as an audiobook while running and so some of my sense of its calamitous predictions may owe more to my exhaustion than to the book itself. But if memory serves this one does not think we are ready – individually or collectively – for the now unstoppable change bearing down on us. Granted not everyone agrees that the disruption of AI is akin to that of fire or agriculture, but Suleyman does, and spends the book explaining in both general statements and detail (though leaning more on the general statements) the likely impacts of such a change. This book, like Mitchell’s, does have some helpful explanations of the technology itself which for a new reader may be appreciated.

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick – Definitely the best choice if you are new to AI or new to caring about it or barely sure you ought to care about it but tired of your beloved blogger talking about it. Written for an every audience, this book explains both a brief history of AI (emphasis on brief) before talking about some potential impacts of generative AI on the workforce and on individual and then advancing arguments for how to use AI in your life and, more importantly, how urgent it is that there be “serious” conversations about AI. I tend to think calling for ‘conversations’ is a bit of a dodge, but I suppose calling for legislation might be beyond the scope.

The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil – Explains how computers will most certainly become smarter than humans and what that will mean for humanity and ideas of consciousness. For someone beset with death anxiety, some reassuring hope that I’ll live forever in an AI simulation. IF I’M NOT ALREADY….

The AI Revolution in Medicine by Peter Lee and some others – I was going to be facilitating a thing for health care professionals about AI and so I read this book and my take away is that health care and doctors are already using generative AI and there should probably be some kind of plan for that from or by someone. Not it.

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian – If you’ve heard the parable of the paperclips that take over the world because their human programmers tell them just to keep making paper clips until they destroy humanity in search of metal then you’ve heard about the alignment problem. It is a problem. Happily for this literary scholar, Christian seems to think this is a problem best solved with a multi- inter-disciplinary approach. If it can be solved at all, and the consequences (dire for all paper clip lovers) avoided.

If you were going to read just one? I’d say A Guide for Thinking Humans if you want to get what AI is about, God Human Animal Machine if you don’t care much for AI but agree that it’s worth thinking about, and Co-Intelligence if you’re ready to start using ChatGPT but haven’t know where to start. Though if that is true, we barely know one another at all.