Tag: technology

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia

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Code Dependent is an investigation into the human side of AI: the ordinary, non-Silicon Valley people affected by and involved in areas relating to artificial intelligence. Journalist Madhumita Murgia tells the stories of people and communities impacted by AI from people labelling AI training data to people whose lives are changed by the decisions of AI systems or having deep fake videos made of them. Not everything is negative: there’s also healthcare benefits, if only these technologies can be made freely available and in places that most need them. And as the book moves towards the ending, Murgia argues that these stories give us principles we should consider going forward to ensure AI works for ordinary people, not the other way around.

Notably, this book focuses on the human side of technology, rather than the technological side, and foregrounds the experiences of people and the complexity of AI’s role. Even for areas that are often discussed in other books, such as predictive policing, this book offers examples I’ve not seen before and direct interviews with people affected, not something all technology books have. At the same time, it does provide an accessible description of a lot of AI-related technologies; for example, it’s the first time I’ve seen—as someone who reads a lot about AI—a simple explanation of what a ‘transformer’ is and why it has been so important for generative AI. This combination makes Code Dependent useful both for people who do read tech books, but are interested in human stories rather than the same talking points, and people who are newer to the topic and would like a way in that focuses on people.

Sometimes I found the framing or phrasing a bit simplistic or lacking nuance and complexity, but generally, it was an accessible book about AI that tells stories rather than just facts, and takes areas we might have heard or read plenty about and shows specific people’s lives in relation to these topics. The parting message about religions coming together to discuss AI was not where I expected the book to go and I’m not quite sure how I feel about that being the conclusion (given that high up people in a religion aren’t really ‘ordinary people’ necessarily), but I do appreciate that this was a book about AI that had a lot of things I’d not read about before, or at least not in this form.

Given the current hype and fear around AI, Code Dependent is likely to become a much-talked-about book, offering people a different way in to reading and thinking about artificial intelligence and what it means for our lives.

Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

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Human Compatible is a book by an eminent AI researcher that looks at how AI works and the questions that need to be considered, philosophically and practically, to try and ensure AI follows the right objectives and control. Russell runs through ideas of intelligence, how AI might be used and misused, key debates in AI, and the complications of humans themselves, in a mostly approachable way, with more complex explanations put in appendices at the end. As someone who co-wrote a popular textbook on AI, Russell knows how to point towards examples and thought from a range of fields to consider the problems of AI, defining goals, and trying to create AI that has regulations and can handle the complexity of human thought and preferences.

There are a few sections and explanations that need either a bit more concentration or some prior knowledge, particularly around logic, but in general the book serves as an in-depth look at how artificial intelligence works and might work, and the issues around the choices AI does and might make. What makes the book particularly good as either an introduction to AI or as an introduction to the philosophy and ethics around AI is that Russell believes in the importance of AI research, but also on the need to look at the ethical issues and background from other disciplines to inform choices made about AI. The fusion of explaining the past, present, and future of AI, and also laying out of the complexity of issues including bias, ethics, and preferences, makes this book both harder to read at times and more useful than other popular science type books on AI.

As someone who reads about AI rather than understands or works on it from a technical point of view, I don’t know if what Russell raises here can be included in the AI of the future, but that doesn’t necessarily seem like the point. The book is here to present these key issues and to suggest how, broadly, different kinds of thinking may be needed to further artificial intelligence in ways that are actually useful to humanity.