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danpluscoffee 's review for:
AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan
Extremely ambitious. If I was reviewing strictly the nonfiction explainers that accompany each "vision", I'd give this five stars. Lee provides an engaging tour of all the ways in which AI is transforming our lives, and I learned a ton. It's worth reading for that half of the book alone.
That being said....the other half of the book is made up of short stories, and many of them just didn't work for me.
It's mainly because the vitamins are only partially crushed up in the food here. Characters throughout all ten stories talk in incredibly unrealistic ways in service of teaching the reader more about AI. That unnatural dialog was at times an absolute slog and took me out of the story. I wish it had just been saved for the explainers.
My rankings of all ten visions from most engaging to least:
1. Holy Driver - autonomous vehicles, smart cities, ethics
2. The Job Savior - AI job displacement, UBI
3. Quantum Genocide - quantum computers, bitcoin, existential threat
4. Dreaming of Plenitude - post-scarcity economics
5. Twin Sparrows - natural language processing, GPT-3
6. Gods Behind the Masks - deepfakes, computer vision
7. Contactless Love - AI in healthcare, covid accelerating automation
8. My Haunting Idol - AR/VR/MR, brain-computer interfaces
9. Isle of Happiness - AI and quantifying human happiness
10. The Golden Elephant - deep learning, big data
That being said....the other half of the book is made up of short stories, and many of them just didn't work for me.
It's mainly because the vitamins are only partially crushed up in the food here. Characters throughout all ten stories talk in incredibly unrealistic ways in service of teaching the reader more about AI. That unnatural dialog was at times an absolute slog and took me out of the story. I wish it had just been saved for the explainers.
My rankings of all ten visions from most engaging to least:
1. Holy Driver - autonomous vehicles, smart cities, ethics
2. The Job Savior - AI job displacement, UBI
3. Quantum Genocide - quantum computers, bitcoin, existential threat
4. Dreaming of Plenitude - post-scarcity economics
5. Twin Sparrows - natural language processing, GPT-3
6. Gods Behind the Masks - deepfakes, computer vision
7. Contactless Love - AI in healthcare, covid accelerating automation
8. My Haunting Idol - AR/VR/MR, brain-computer interfaces
9. Isle of Happiness - AI and quantifying human happiness
10. The Golden Elephant - deep learning, big data