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embot77's reviews
150 reviews
I Want to Eat Your Pancreas by Yoru Sumino
emotional
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs by David Runciman
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
With reliance on Marxist and Thomas Hobbes's "Leviathan," this think piece breaks down how we as individuals have already given over our decision-making power to artifical intelligence (AI) due to our creation of the State (ex. government) and corporations. This book also explains why one should not give total control to AI due to AI's current inability to consider humanistic factors like sacrifice and emotion. What comes across as lacking is how we should proceed with this information (aside from getting more involved with politics). I believe further development in chapter 7 to the end may be beneficial to the average reader.
Below are the notes I took while listening to the book. Feel free to read them if you don't mind spoilers:
After listening to the first chapter, I recognize this book to be more on the philosophical side. The first chapter addressed consciousness on the level of the State and the people, noting that one body does not have to make decisions AND act. I want to review this book and go through how they refer to superagents. There were various identies one could attribute to the state such as an artificial man, an extension of human, an inhuman diety, and a fiction.
Just started and finished the third chapter in one sitting, and my head is swimming. Since people are subject to group thinking (which lacks individual choice expression but rather follows the motions of the group without really thinking about what or why they're doing it), the State is considered a artificial human and so are corporations. However, the people that make up the state are not held liable for their actions while a corporation, specifically a partnership, can. The State can have a general purpose but the corporations could have as many purposes as there are members. States are hard to build and harder to destroy, but corporations are the opposite (that's why there are so few long-standing corporations).
21:20 into chapter 4, the start of the AI focused part of the book, and the ideas of all human, all machine, and the 1/2 and 1/2 reminds me of Descartes's "man in the machine" and a paper I wrote on the digital doppelganger. The latter focused on how, as we give away our information on the internet, we are creating a digital avatar in an echo chamber, forced to be the consumer and the consumed.
I'm 30 minutes into chapter 8 when the author writes "Unemployment rates are at historic lows in the U.S., and job vacancies are currently high. The same is currently true in the U.K.; jobs are not in short supply despite increasing availability of machines to compete for the work. What's in short supply is people wanting to do them." While "them" could refer to the machines, the context implies that people don't want to work. This does not take into consideration layoff spillover, AI leveling the resumé playing-field, and the general timeline expansion of the hiring process. Similar to fake-job opportunities, misinformation like this discredits and disrespects those who are truly struggling to obtain a job. I'm very disappointed in this author.
Below are the notes I took while listening to the book. Feel free to read them if you don't mind spoilers:
After listening to the first chapter, I recognize this book to be more on the philosophical side. The first chapter addressed consciousness on the level of the State and the people, noting that one body does not have to make decisions AND act. I want to review this book and go through how they refer to superagents. There were various identies one could attribute to the state such as an artificial man, an extension of human, an inhuman diety, and a fiction.
Just started and finished the third chapter in one sitting, and my head is swimming. Since people are subject to group thinking (which lacks individual choice expression but rather follows the motions of the group without really thinking about what or why they're doing it), the State is considered a artificial human and so are corporations. However, the people that make up the state are not held liable for their actions while a corporation, specifically a partnership, can. The State can have a general purpose but the corporations could have as many purposes as there are members. States are hard to build and harder to destroy, but corporations are the opposite (that's why there are so few long-standing corporations).
21:20 into chapter 4, the start of the AI focused part of the book, and the ideas of all human, all machine, and the 1/2 and 1/2 reminds me of Descartes's "man in the machine" and a paper I wrote on the digital doppelganger. The latter focused on how, as we give away our information on the internet, we are creating a digital avatar in an echo chamber, forced to be the consumer and the consumed.
I'm 30 minutes into chapter 8 when the author writes "Unemployment rates are at historic lows in the U.S., and job vacancies are currently high. The same is currently true in the U.K.; jobs are not in short supply despite increasing availability of machines to compete for the work. What's in short supply is people wanting to do them." While "them" could refer to the machines, the context implies that people don't want to work. This does not take into consideration layoff spillover, AI leveling the resumé playing-field, and the general timeline expansion of the hiring process. Similar to fake-job opportunities, misinformation like this discredits and disrespects those who are truly struggling to obtain a job. I'm very disappointed in this author.