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A review by mastben11
AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee
4.0
This book surprised me.
I found 'AI Superpowers' while looking for material to research AI's effects on future employment, in an effort to better educate myself for a writing project I hope to get a good start on during NaNoWriMo in November. As evidenced by my Goodreads activity, I generally avoid non-fiction to a fault. My main issue with many non-fiction books is generally that they are overlong. An author gets a book deal from an essay or two, and then stretches that essay from fourteen pages into 400, with lots of added evidence and very little added shape. I'm certain that thousands of books could counter my cynicism, and that my judgments have formed a clot in the flow of non-fiction I should be reading. Plus, I like reading about dragons and stuff like that.
However, Lee's book has shape. Each chapter is different from the previous in scope and argument, and each one needs the previous to function well. While Lee's personal life takes center stage in one chapter, it isn't for a contrived framework that all the chapters can hang from but as a necessary backdrop for his conclusions in the subsequent chapters.
Lee, a venture capitalist and prominent AI researcher, swings his credentials around with ease but without arrogance, which I appreciated, and instead of dismantling the differing arguments of other professionals, he uses their material to better argue his own conclusions. The problem with other research isn't that it was misguided or falsified but that it was somehow still incomplete, and Lee attempts to use conclusions from previous studies alongside new developments in the technology. This approach feels naturally diplomatic while still scientific, as if his respect for other researchers' work genuinely eclipses the drive to knock their conclusions down a peg and establish himself as the One True Voice of AI research.
What surprised me most was Lee's empathetic writing. Without losing his convictions in his own understanding of AI, he writes not as an aloof entrepreneur coaxing a book deal out of a vast, untouchable pile of knowledge, or as a dismayed doomsayer beckoning us toward despair in the face of the age of robotics. He considers ramifications of AI for both blue- and white-collar workers, without devaluing one or the other. He condemns vicious competition between countries' technological developments as being unsustainable, and fears more about the wealth gap new technology will further than for a Westworld-style AI uprising. In no uncertain terms he indicates how worthless human diagnoses, appraisals, and calculations will soon become (or already have become) in comparison to those of a competent AI creation, but never connects this to the worthlessness of humans themselves, who offer something AI will not master for centuries: love. The task for humanity then, he argues, is to lay the foundation of public policy that will best allow us to use this gift alongside the inevitable AI-dependent world we will soon found ourselves in.
And however corny that feels, it mattered to me.
I found 'AI Superpowers' while looking for material to research AI's effects on future employment, in an effort to better educate myself for a writing project I hope to get a good start on during NaNoWriMo in November. As evidenced by my Goodreads activity, I generally avoid non-fiction to a fault. My main issue with many non-fiction books is generally that they are overlong. An author gets a book deal from an essay or two, and then stretches that essay from fourteen pages into 400, with lots of added evidence and very little added shape. I'm certain that thousands of books could counter my cynicism, and that my judgments have formed a clot in the flow of non-fiction I should be reading. Plus, I like reading about dragons and stuff like that.
However, Lee's book has shape. Each chapter is different from the previous in scope and argument, and each one needs the previous to function well. While Lee's personal life takes center stage in one chapter, it isn't for a contrived framework that all the chapters can hang from but as a necessary backdrop for his conclusions in the subsequent chapters.
Lee, a venture capitalist and prominent AI researcher, swings his credentials around with ease but without arrogance, which I appreciated, and instead of dismantling the differing arguments of other professionals, he uses their material to better argue his own conclusions. The problem with other research isn't that it was misguided or falsified but that it was somehow still incomplete, and Lee attempts to use conclusions from previous studies alongside new developments in the technology. This approach feels naturally diplomatic while still scientific, as if his respect for other researchers' work genuinely eclipses the drive to knock their conclusions down a peg and establish himself as the One True Voice of AI research.
What surprised me most was Lee's empathetic writing. Without losing his convictions in his own understanding of AI, he writes not as an aloof entrepreneur coaxing a book deal out of a vast, untouchable pile of knowledge, or as a dismayed doomsayer beckoning us toward despair in the face of the age of robotics. He considers ramifications of AI for both blue- and white-collar workers, without devaluing one or the other. He condemns vicious competition between countries' technological developments as being unsustainable, and fears more about the wealth gap new technology will further than for a Westworld-style AI uprising. In no uncertain terms he indicates how worthless human diagnoses, appraisals, and calculations will soon become (or already have become) in comparison to those of a competent AI creation, but never connects this to the worthlessness of humans themselves, who offer something AI will not master for centuries: love. The task for humanity then, he argues, is to lay the foundation of public policy that will best allow us to use this gift alongside the inevitable AI-dependent world we will soon found ourselves in.
And however corny that feels, it mattered to me.