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The AI Delusion cover art

The AI Delusion

By: Gary Smith
Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
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Summary

We live in an incredible period in history. The computer revolution may be even more life-changing than the Industrial Revolution. We can do things with computers that could never be done before, and computers can do things for us that could never be done before. But our love of computers should not cloud our thinking about their limitations.

We are told that computers are smarter than humans and that data mining can identify previously unknown truths or make discoveries that will revolutionize our lives. Our lives may well be changed, but not necessarily for the better. Computers are very good at discovering patterns but are useless in judging whether the unearthed patterns are sensible because computers do not think the way humans think.

We fear that super-intelligent machines will decide to protect themselves by enslaving or eliminating humans. But the real danger is not that computers are smarter than us but that we think computers are smarter than us and, so, trust computers to make important decisions for us.

The AI Delusion explains why we should not be intimidated into thinking that computers are infallible, that data-mining is knowledge discovery, and that black boxes should be trusted.

©2018 Gary Smith (P)2018 Tantor

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Required reading

I am the Head of AI for a large corporate, I’ve spent the last 10 years working with data in financial services and building AI & data products that work.

This book should be required, if sober, reading for all “Data Scientists”.

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Explains what computing is and isn't

this book explains what computing (and AI) is and isn't in a language your grandma will understand. For someone who knows the field of computer science, mathematics, etc. this book has very little news.

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Good counter to the current AI hype

This book may be five years old now, so from before the Generative AI / Chat GPT excitement reached full fever pitch, but as this is about the core fundamentals (statistics, probability, contextual understanding), this doesn't really matter. The goal here is to demonstrate why and how machines think the way they do - and so to demonstrate their limitations and encourage rational/critical thinking when working with them.

The basic argument: Correlation does not equal causation; humans are bad at remembering this, but AI bots are even worse, because they have no true conception of wider reality, and so don't really understand what "cause" means. But they're getting very good at acting like they do...

Combine that with the surprising statistical frequency of things that seem like meaningful patterns that tend to crop up when analysing large datasets, and there's a lot of potential for AI to identify false positives without being able to self-correct. And as most AI models are black box algorithms that even their human creators don't fully understand, it's almost impossible for humans to effectively counter this tendency.

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