Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2024
Last year, the chief executive of a new online T-shirt company in Portugal announced that he had named ChatGPT as “the CEO” of his start-up. According to Jeremy Kahn, author of “Mastering AI,” Joáo Ferráo dos Santos named his new company “AIsthetic Apparel” and said he “would simply execute the tasks ChatGPT recommended.”
I predict you’ll meet dozens of people who will be talking about this fascinating new book in the months ahead. The project began as a “Fortune” magazine cover story on OpenAI and the creation of ChatGPT and evolved into this powerhouse overview of artificial intelligence. The author is an award-winning journalist for “Fortune” and writes their weekly “Eye on AI” newsletter, plus cochairs Fortune’s Brainstorm AI technology conferences.
Jeremy Kahn is very optimistic about AI, but moderates the good news with ample bad news. Examples:
CHAPTER 4: EVERYONE ON AUTOPILOT
• Good News. Discussing “the return of the human apprentice,” Kahn lists law firms that are creatively using AI legal software. He quotes Jake Heller, co-founder of Casetext, who says that “AI should make the profession less ‘draining and soul sucking.’” (How would you describe your profession?)
• Bad News. For many gig economy workers (Uber, etc.), they soon discover “that the only way to earn a decent wage is to meet the demanding, sometimes inhumane, expectations of an algorithm.”
• Good News. Walmart uses “My Assistant,” an AI copilot and 50,000 employees have access to this new software aide.
CHAPTER 12: WAR AT MACHINE SPEED
The first chapter I read in “Mastering AI” was “War at Machine Speed.” Oh, my!
• Bad News. “Deploying autonomous weapons places us on a slippery slope to losing control over warfare. Autonomy inevitably begs more autonomy.” Kahn summarizes the potential results between enemies: “Spy vs. spy becomes AI vs. AI.”
• Bad News. When terrorists and nations have "a new toy for mass murder: artificial intelligence," we will find that AI is an accelerant, not a deterrent, to war—thus “…making conflict more likely and expanding, not limiting, its scope."
• Bad News. Noting the “naked soldier” scenario from Michael Walzer, “a philosopher known for his thinking about the ethics of warfare,” the author believes “the critical issue is that autonomous weapons obliterate the possibility of mercy.” (Must-read!)
CHAPTER 7: ARISTOTLE IN YOUR POCKET
• Good News. Students cheered the November 2022 release of ChatGPT and labeled it “CheatGPT,” but teachers panicked. Yet Kahn pushes back. “AI will change education. Teachers will need to adopt new methods. But the moral panic and hand-wringing is misplaced.” (He reminds us that CliffsNotes in the 1950s and calculators in the 1970s also created misplaced hysteria.)
• Bad News or Good News? “If the AI revolution helps dethrone the lecture as the primary pedagogical tool in undergraduate education and replaces it with the seminar, that would be no bad thing.” (Attention Church Leaders: Might AI displace the sermon? Is that good or bad?)
• Good News or Bad News? “AI is an existential threat to colleges and universities. But not because of the risk of rampant cheating. No, the real risk to higher education is irrelevancy.”
CHAPTER 2: THE VOICE INSIDE YOUR HEAD
• Bad News. In the section, “The Erasure of Provenance,” Kahn writes, “Memory and its link to learning is just one cognitive ability AI may damage. It could diminish our intellectual powers in other ways, too.” He adds that generative AI, in “providing a confident summarized answer, makes the abandonment of critical thinking all too easy. Anyone who has conversed with ChatGPT or its rivals, Bing, Gemini, and Claude, will know that these chatbots are often wrong, even when they sound right.” He fears “groupthink.”
• Good News/Bad News. The good news is that Kahn’s comprehensive book—efficiently written from a competent reporter’s perspective—sounds the AI alarm and addresses both ethical and moral issues. The bad news: “…our use of AI to write and read for us is just one way this technology could contribute to a risky moral deskilling. More troubling is the delegation of decisions that require moral judgment to AI.”
• Good News. What about AI in the classroom? “Children should also be instructed in ethics. And vitally, they must still learn how to write.” Gratefully, Kahn probes deep on the moral and ethical issues of AI in every chapter.
CHAPTER 5: PILLARS OF INDUSTRY
• Good News. The publishing industry will benefit “…where AI might not just help authors write, but also change the way books are read, changing the industry’s economics.” Example: you will have an “AI reading companion that can answer questions, look up unfamiliar references, or provide literary analysis.” Watch for virtual book clubs also.
• Bad News. The big will get bigger (architectural firms, major movie studios, law firms, etc.), but “midsize businesses will probably fare the worst.” (Read why “the business models of entire fields will be upended.”)
• Good News. This is a wake-up call! AI will enable “personalized product promotion” with more intelligent use of customer data. Example: Domino’s Pizza in Mexico were victims of the old adage that “half of an ad budget is wasted, you just don’t know which half.” Now with AI software, they’ve grouped their customers “into several buckets, and using AI, offered predictions of the best messages, best medium, and best times to reach out to people.”
• More Good News. “As a result, Domino’s Mexico saw a 700 percent increase in the return on its Google ad spending and cut customer acquisition costs by 65 percent, while increasing customer retention.”
THERE’S MORE!
I can’t stop talking about this book. I’m astounded at the deep-and-wide content of “Mastering AI.” The book checks all the boxes and I’ve underlined hundreds of insights, including:
• History: ENIAC and the Turing Test (“AI’s Original Sin”)
• Authenticity and Trust: ontology and epistemology
• Why Microsoft built a data center in Iowa the size of 20 football fields!
• Why early innovators hated the term “artificial intelligence” and why “deep learning” was a brilliant term
• Why “confabulation,” not “hallucination,” might describe AI’s shortcomings better
Someone on your team needs to read this book. (Gift this book to your pastor or priest also!) And thanks to the publisher for sending me a review copy.