Brian Christian – The Alignment Problem
The analogies between human and machine learning strategies are skillfully narrated, but rather drawn out.
Bayesian nets help prevent flawed statistical arguments and enable the leap from correlation to causation
Judea Pearl and Dana MacKenzie – The book of Why
The practical and relevant examples (health effect of smoking, impact of humanity on climate change) of causal inference alone make the book worthwhile.
AI increasingly constrains the domain of human creativity, similar to how science has constrained Faith
Marcus de Sautoy – The creativity code
Surprisingly up-beat considering its message and packed with nice examples.
Feigning intelligence is not too difficult, considering that people can be fooled in many different ways
Brian Christian – The most human human
Unfortunately, the book does not explicitly challenge if humans are adequate judges in the Turing test.
Turing’s suprisingly practical perspective on logic, intelligence, and machines was far ahead of his time
Andrew Hodges – Alan Turing: The imitation game
A quite complete account of the life and death of one of the most fascinating figures of early computing.
The US is losing out in AI, due to a lack of long-term vision and direction
The book’s set-up with multiple scenarios for the future works surprisingly well and is especiall concerning for European readers: Europe is almost completely irrelevant in all of Webb’s scenarios.
Economically speaking, AI makes prediction a commodity – and nothing more
Ajay Argawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb – Prediction machines
The authors see AI as just a new option for the division of labor which, although it can have rather dramatic consequences, does not support apocalyptic GAI fearmongering.
AI outcomes reflect the thinking of the technochauvinists that built it – which may not be desirable for society
Meridith Broussard – Artificial Unintelligence
Great effort to democratize AI and peel off some layers of mistique that harm public debate (althought the case against technochauvinism seems at times a bit too shallow).
Compared to the Chinese tech scene, Silicon Valley is slow and complacent
Former Google China Chief explains why China will win the AI race when it comes to applications of deep learning in the physical world.
Digitization, network effects, and participation will continue to disrupt many markets
Machine, Platform, Crowd – Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Decent summary of developments with some nice examples, but not sufficiently new or surprising to classify as ‘essential reading’.