Scared of AI? 11 essential books for navigating our new normal
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Despite its ubiquity in our machines and in the news, artificial intelligence remains both a mystery and a source of deep anxiety across occupations and generations.My students, my readers, my colleagues and kids: We are all bewildered by the mix of hype and hope, optimism and doomerism making up the discourse around AI.
On the one hand, the quest for artificial general intelligence (AGI) and a utopian belief in the life-improving promise of these emergent technologies; on the other, new algorithmic forms of injustice, the displacement of whole work forces and the limitless sloppification of language, music, video and other aesthetic forms — to say nothing of the threat of human extinction.The 11 books described below, all published recently, give us helpful sight lines into our turbulent AI age.Some titles are hard-hitting trade nonfiction.
One is an academic critique.Others are novels, fictional accounts that imagine how our world is being reshaped (and will be further transformed) by the many technologies grouped under the term artificial intelligence: deepfakes and autonomous drones, AI-enhanced medical scans and self-driving cars.What all these books have in common is their awareness that AI is transforming our world in ways all too easy to imagine yet nearly impossible to predict.“Vantage Point” By Sara SligarMCD: 400 pages, $29This twisty and brilliantly written thriller about a Maine family spins a tale of ambition, trauma and privilege around the proliferation of so-called deepfakes.
Those AI-generated videos play an increasing role in the spread of slanderous accusations and political disinformation in today’s public sphere.Whether the footage at the center of the plot is real or computer-generated is one of the burning questions at the heart of the novel, which plumbs the nature of reality in our age of digital disinformation and virtual selves.“The Worlds...