ππ ππ¨π reviews books
When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.
βRalph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar (1837)
Book matters
Books are a purpose-built technology for understanding complex ideas. I review those that have helped me understand AI and education, and that have inspired some insight or thought worth sharing on AI Log.
I recommend buying every book I review. But, please, not on Amazon, which uses its business practices and size to reduce competition. Writers, editors, illustrators, designers, and book publishers should get paid a living wage for their work. A competitive market for books and ebooks helps make that happen.
Please buy your books from your local bookstore or order them online from bookshop.org, which will mail them to you just like Amazon does. The difference is that bookshop.org will give the profits to your local bookstore.
ππ ππ¨π Book Reviews 2024
Grading is a black box inside a very old, very slow AI
The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind (2024) by Dan Davies.
Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It (2024) by Joshua R. Eyler.
The long and the short of our confidence in AI
AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Canβt, and How to Tell the Difference (2024) by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor.
The Ordinal Society (2024) by Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy.
Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning (2024) by JosΓ© Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson.
Ethan Mollick says anthropomorphizing AI is a sin of necessity. Repent! I say
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI (2024) by Ethan Mollick.
Early Daysβthe first AI Log book review
AI Log started out on LinkedIn in 2023, with me writing each week about something that was happening in the world of AI and education. Early on, I mostly highlighted writing and writers who were not losing their minds with excitement over AI, and occasionally something my own experiments with AI. I didnβt really know what I was doing writing a blog, and honestly, I still donβt. I learned that writing book reviews is something I like to do, and based on comments and clicks, my readers seem to like it, too.
The first book review I wrote was about The Other Side of Empathy (2023) by Jade E. Davis. That book contains the best sentence about AI that I read in 2023: "Artificial Intelligence assumes the past has the answer to the futureβs questions."
Here is that original review, lightly edited for clarity but unchanged in its essentials.
Generative AI is emerging in a larger social context that shapes how these new tools are used, and of course, the tools themselves are shaping society. The writing that has most helped me think about the role images play in this process is Jade E. Davisβs The Other Side of Empathy. The book is a critique of βempathy cultureβ and the way empathy erases human understanding and leaves unquestioned the structures of power that shape society. Her readings of photographs and technology projects deepened my sense of how historical analysis can approach AI as a social problem. It lays out how digital technologies inflict violence and other harms on people in a way that places machine learning in its historical contexts.
As one example of the power of this book, I had encountered the Deep Empathy project as part of my meandering exploration of AI and higher education over the past year. I felt vaguely disturbed by it's treatment of human suffering and moved on. Davisβs account of that project, which tries to use AI to "increase empathy for victims of far-away disasters," helped me understand why I was disturbed.
The Other Side of Empathy provides a conceptual framework that helps think in new ways about the problems of using digital technology and machine learning for the purpose of social justice.