How successful is the approach of presenting artificial intelligence as an author in providing a common sense introduction to a topic subject to such sensationalism?
There are two major problems facing authors trying to write manuals on artificial intelligence. First, by the time you wrote it, the ice age pace of the book publishing industry has effectively made your work obsolete before the ink has dried. Second, with so many books published on the subject, it’s virtually impossible to find a niche area where you can differentiate yourself.
“Confessions of an AI Brain” (Springer, £25.00, ISBN 9783031259340) paradoxically overcomes the first problem by not trying to say anything new, but the second problem is that the human first person countered by a clever literary construction that tells the story from the point of view of AI’s “brain” itself.
Miranda – as authors Elena Fersman, Paul Petterson and Athanasios Carapantellakis call their AI brains – said, “I always wanted to know about AI, but I was afraid to ask. “Everything” is our patient guide through this thoroughly entertaining primer that might as well be called. . The advantage of letting AI tell its own story is that it can bring readers back to the basics, like reminding them of the differences between data, information, and knowledge, without making them feel inferior.
This is more important than you might think. Because we all know that given enough time, machine learning will solve the difference between cats and dogs, but we may have forgotten how this is achieved. And we should remember this, says Miranda. Because how else can Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs be applied to the AI pyramid, where data is at the bottom and insight is at the top?
Miranda also helps provide a “what did you learn?” at the end of the chapter. Bullet points. These are the “confession” in the title. And if you’re so inclined, stating that she could read the book in 10 minutes just by skipping over to this bite-sized nugget of AI wisdom isn’t much of a reviewer’s confession. . I was better informed than when I started. Embarrassing gaps in knowledge about the Internet of Things and digital twins, bias and diversity, model drift and sustainability are all neatly filled in Miranda’s no-nonsense summaries presented in (mostly) non-technical vocabulary.
But don’t skip the main chapters. Despite its brevity and humor, at one point Miranda suggests that the optimal strategy for saving the planet is to eliminate humans. “Confessions of an AI Brain” is his one of the best introductions. AI becomes available. Because it brings common sense to the general reader, who has been subjected to mainstream media sensationalism around the subject.
My only quibble is about the metaphysical rabbit hole of introducing Miranda as an author, which is to explain artificial intelligence to humans by pretending that the human author is an artificial intelligence. I mean On second thought, it all makes perfect sense. It’s wonderful.
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