Cade reviewed AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan
Good intro for the average person, doesn't cover everything AI related.
5 stars
This is a pretty good primer on a few different AI technologies by experts in the field who are generally positive about AI development. It provided a good contrast to the (well-researched) generally negative videos and articles I had seen on the topic so far.
The best part of the book is the extended metaphor in the introduction, comparing the term "AI" to the term "vehicle". Vehicle is a category covering everything from bikes to trucks to space rockets to boats, but if we didn't have separate terms for all those things, we couldn't have meaningful conversations about them, especially their benefits and harms. This is one of the big problems we are running into with discussing "AI" now.
I found the section on predictive AI excellent. It's essentially the core of the book and was really informative since I knew next to nothing about that.
On the other hand, …
This is a pretty good primer on a few different AI technologies by experts in the field who are generally positive about AI development. It provided a good contrast to the (well-researched) generally negative videos and articles I had seen on the topic so far.
The best part of the book is the extended metaphor in the introduction, comparing the term "AI" to the term "vehicle". Vehicle is a category covering everything from bikes to trucks to space rockets to boats, but if we didn't have separate terms for all those things, we couldn't have meaningful conversations about them, especially their benefits and harms. This is one of the big problems we are running into with discussing "AI" now.
I found the section on predictive AI excellent. It's essentially the core of the book and was really informative since I knew next to nothing about that.
On the other hand, because I already had learned a lot about generative AI (language models, image generators, etc.), that part of the book wasn't too helpful to me and I skimmed a lot of it.
