Henry Farrell over at his substack, Programmable Mutter:
Towards the end of his new book, The Irrational Decision, Ben Recht explains what he has set out to do.
Most books on technology either take the side that all technology is bad, or all technology is good. This isn’t one of those books. Such books focus too much on harms and not enough on limits. Limits are more empowering. Throughout the book, I’ve maintained that mathematical rationality is limited in what kinds of problems it is best placed to solve but has sweet spots that have yielded remarkable technological advances.
It may be that more books on technology escape the good-bad dichotomy than Ben allows. Even so, I haven’t read another book that is nearly as useful in explaining why and where the broad family of approaches that we (perhaps unfortunately) call AI work, and why and where they don’t. Ben (who is a mate) combines a deep understanding of the technologies with a grasp of the history and ability to write clearly and well about complicated things. I learned a lot from this book. Very likely, you will too.
The good-bad dichotomy that Ben describes does indeed shape a whole lot of our current debate around “mathematical rationality” and AI.
More here.
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