Martin Hähnel

Mini-Review: The AI Con

I give this a 4 out of 5 because it has helped me to fill out my intuitions about "AI" with facts and sourced stories. I could not give it more, though, because it left me numb in a similar fashion like the unhabitable earth/we are the weather did back then as regards to climate change : I come off of it feeling as fatalistic as ever.

In other words: A book like this doesn't do enough - which is an unkind thing to say - to let me see a future beyond just rejection of the described present extended into the future. Maybe that's asking too much of a contemporary critique of the AI-industry.

One interesting note: I am a programmer and I have found LLMs to be helpful at times. It's interesting how little this book focuses on LLMs for programming. And I do agree: I see much bigger problems with the technology in law, medicine, administration, etc. I can't deny, though, that I would have liked a little more substance when it comes to the field of software development which is also full of hype, but I think it's not as clear-cut that "AI" is a net negative here.

That's all there is to my mini review on the Storygraph.[1]

  1. Which I wrote about here ↩︎