The older I get, the more I want I could quit time so I could study more books. Books that earn my time and interest are these that guarantee to enrich me as a particular person and deepen my understanding of AI for the work I do as senior AI employees writer at VentureBeat.
This year, I study more than a dozen books, some published in current months and other individuals in years previous, like The Curse of Bigness by Tim Wu, a good study for any person interested in understanding antitrust, and the novel Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, a single of my favourite books of all time.
Facts and insights from the books I study normally uncover their way into my stories. For instance, final year I wrote about how AI ethics is all about energy in a work that drew heavily on Race and Technology by Ruha Benjamin and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. Reading The Big Nine also helped deepen my understanding of what could go incorrect if organizations like Amazon, Facebook, and Google develop with out challenge for the subsequent 50 years.
As the year winds down, here’s a rundown and some thoughts on nine books I study in 2020 that touch on artificial intelligence. Some books on this list are more about art or the study of Black tech cyberculture than AI, but each and every provides believed-provoking insights a exclusive viewpoint or a window into how AI impacts business enterprise, balances of energy, or human rights. Best of all, quite a few of the books integrated right here try to picture an option tech future with out gross violations of human rights or accelerating inequalities.
Black Futures
This book came collectively following some Twitter DMs a handful of years ago and is the finest blend of words and imagery on this list. Black Futures was edited by New York Times Magazine employees writer Jenna Wortham and art curator Kimberly Drew and released December 1.
With more than one hundred contributors and almost 500 pages of quick reads and wealthy visuals, Black Futures is a collection of poems, memes, original essays, photography, and art. It’s created to be study in no unique order, and Drew and Wortham encourage you to study along with an world wide web-connected device so you can search for names, terms, and web sites described in the text.
You can study a soliloquy from a repertory theater play on a single web page and study about the video game Hair Nah on the subsequent. And you can laugh at #ThanksgivingWithBlackHouseholds memes and then comply with that up with a piece about Black queer culture, Black poltical action, or Black energy naps. There’s also a mix of sensible tips, like how to survive a police riot and how to make an archive for a Black future, like the Octavia E. Butler collection maintained by the Huntington Library in Los Angeles.
When it comes to AI, a single of my favourite components is the story of Alisha Wormsley, a self-described Black sci-fi nerd who purchased a billboard in Pittsburgh basically to promote the mantra “There are Black people in the future.” This gets at the whiteness of AI in science fiction and pop culture that in quite a few situations seeks to erase Black people today from existence, according to investigation released earlier this year.
That piece also cites a favourite Martin Luther King, Jr. quote on automation that says, “When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
Another piece in the book calls dreaming of a Black disabled future a radical act. Former Google Ethical AI co-lead Timnit Gebru touched on the thought of envisioning a more inclusive globe when she told VentureBeat in an interview earlier this month that she desires young Black people today and girls who witnessed her mistreatment to know that their perspectives are an invaluable component of imagining option futures.
Contributors to this book consist of writers like Hannah Giorgis Ta-Nehisi Coates Nikole Hannah-Jones Wesley Morris, who co-hosts the podcast Still Processing with Jenna Wortham and singer Solange Knowles.
One of my favourite factors about Black Futures may be that a single of the book’s 10 sections is committed to Black joy. I’ve never ever observed that just before. Once you can really invite people today inside your household once more, Black Futures will make a lovely coffee table book that lets guests flip via, dive in, and get lost in a great way.
Monopolies Suck: 7 Ways Big Corporations Rule Your Life and How to Take Back Control
This is a book for people today who really feel helpless in the face of effective companies. In Monopolies Suck, Sally Hubbard tends to make the case that anticompetitive behavior and industry concentration are benefiting not just Big Tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, but organizations all through practically every single big sector in the United States today.
She recognizes the deleterious consequences of industry concentration beyond tech, like increasing rates in the airline sector, cost gouging in pharmaceutical drugs, and unhealthy effects on the meals we consume. In outlining these harms, Hubbard compares wellness care business enterprise conglomerates to organized crime mafias.
She also argues that monopolies cut down the American dream, ramp up inequality, cripple innovation, and threaten democracy.
The book recognizes the viewpoints and influence of historically considerable figures in the history of antitrust, namely Sen. John Sherman, whose Sherman Act supplies the base of antitrust law today, and Robert Bork, whose conservative viewpoints have shaped the attitudes of judges and lawmakers. Hubbard also examines the part algorithms, information, and surveillance play in consolidating energy for significant corporations and how these companies lobby lawmakers.
Hubbard utilised to work in the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. Today she operates at the Open Markets Institute. She also testified as an specialist in the antitrust investigation a congressional subcommittee completed this fall.
What I appreciate about this book is that the author requires time to recognize how powerless industry concentration can make people today really feel. At occasions, Hubbard appears to quit just to inform readers they are not crazy, that they genuinely are producing much less cash and enjoying fewer possibilities now than in the previous.
Each chapter ends with a section titled “Your Life, Better” that summarizes the way monopolies decrease your spend or crush the American dream, occasionally supplying tips for how you can take back manage.
Monopolies Suck came out this fall, shortly immediately after the DOJ lawsuit against Google and a congressional subcommittee’s Big Tech antitrust investigation. Both events mark antitrust activity that hasn’t occurred in decades and may well have implications for AI and tech corporations that this year ranked amongst the 10 organizations with the highest industry caps in the globe. Part of me wishes this book had come out immediately after these historic events so that the book integrated Hubbard’s response.
If you are hunting for a book that pulls punches and defers to Big Tech complaints that regulation could negatively effect innovation and the economy, this is not it. But if you or somebody you know may appreciate a cautious examination and guide that can empower everybody to act, Hubbard provides effective insight.
Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World
This book is for business enterprise executives and choice-makers anxious to grasp the methods artificial intelligence will transform business enterprise and society. Harvard Business School professors Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani discover how incumbent organizations and digital challengers will clash and how companies have to re-architect firms and factories in the age of AI. While sometimes drawing on insights from their personal investigation, the coauthors closely examine the forces that helped organizations like Ant Financial and WeChat accomplish unprecedented dominance.
Competing in the Age of AI is an fantastic book for any person in require of a primer on how information and AI transform business enterprise in an increasingly digital economy, making what Iansiti and Lakhani contact a “new breed of companies.” It’s packed complete of uncomplicated-to-fully grasp business enterprise technique and insights into how business enterprise leaders from inside and outdoors the U.S. require to do to adapt and thrive.
As the authors clarify, the book was written to “give readers the insight to prepare for collisions that will inevitably affect their businesses.”
More particularly, it gets into the wisdom this modify calls for from managers and leadership in organizations. The book notes that failure to adapt can leave companies vulnerable to information-driven competitors. Part of that shift will call for managers to discover some machine studying essentials: “just as every MBA student learns about accounting and its salience to business operations without wanting to become a professional accountant, managers need to do the same with AI and the related technology stack,” the book reads.
The book devotes a fair quantity of time examining the network impact, referring to it as an critical component of technique for digital operating models, and lists inquiries managers ought to ask themselves to kind sound technique. Competing in the Age of AI focuses mostly on the possibilities in the age of AI but also briefly confronts a require to address dangers related with AI deployments.
Turning Point: Policymaking in the Era of Artificial Intelligence
Turning Point is a book by Brookings Institution VP Darrell West and Brookings president and retired U.S. Marine Corps 4-star basic and former NATO commander John Allen. Both males have testified just before Congress and advised lawmakers shaping AI policy in the U.S. In a House Budget Committee hearing about the part AI will play in the country’s financial recovery this fall, West talked with Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) about how tech is accelerating inequality.
As it is a Brookings Institution publication, you get to hear from authorities like Brookings scholar William Alston, who argues that government use of facial recognition ought to be treated with the identical legal weight as search warrants. You will also hear about a cross section of big influences on matters of policy and the regulation of artificial intelligence. This is also a single of the only books I’ve ever come across that utilizes totally free Unsplash stock imagery for cover art.
Allen and West help elevated government spending to address problems related with artificial intelligence in the years ahead. Areas of concern variety from education to national defense.
I like that the book does not get beyond web page two with out recognizing AI’s prospective to concentrate wealth and energy. I also appreciate that Allen and West acknowledge how startups like Kairos and Affectiva have refused to accept government or surveillance contracts. But the reader in me also desires to hear the authors examine ties among other AI startups and white supremacy groups or appear into the motives of organizations that are eager to provide surveillance computer software to governments.
Turning Point was released in July and, as its subtitle suggests, is focused on policymaking with artificial intelligence in thoughts. I felt the authors accomplished their purpose of defining how AI is impacting basic elements of people’s lives and shaping the tactics and investments of nation states.
But I disagree with their assertion that there’s no use attempting to ban autonomous weapons or rein in their use. In reality, some nations have currently attempted to rally the world’s governments about a ban on the use of lethal autonomous weapons. And therefore far, about 30 nations, which includes China, have known as for a ban on completely autonomous weapons at UN Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) meetings, according to a Human Rights Watch evaluation.
I also want the ethics chapter appeared earlier in the book, rather of becoming relegated to the final chapters.
While Allen and West commit time to ethics in early applications, business enterprise possibilities are viewed as just before the dangers. Turning Point is not alone in this. Other books on this list, like Competing in the Age of AI, adopt the identical structure.
Turning Point briefly touches on the part machine studying plays in the targeted detainment of Uighur Muslims in China, a topic of value to quite a few of the authors on this list. In notable current updates, news reports emerged earlier this month that identified each Alibaba and Huawei are reportedly testing or promoting facial recognition for tracking members of the Muslim minority group in China.
I also appreciate that the authors took time to recognize the big danger the United States is incurring by failing to graduate adequate people today proficient in science, technologies, engineering, and math (STEM). They also recommend policy approaches to address the problem, which they deem a threat to national safety. Recent cyberattacks described by President-elect Joe Biden as a “grave risk” to the United States illustrate this point.
This is a compelling book for any person anxious to fully grasp how information collection and AI are altering business enterprise, education, defense, and wellness care. It also prescribes policy options, like the creation of a national information technique, cybersecurity protection for the nation’s infrastructure, and the establishment of a national investigation cloud. The latter method is supported by lawmakers in Congress and big companies, as effectively as researchers concerned about increasing inequality amongst AI researchers in the age of deep studying.
Turning Point addresses policy considerations across a broad spectrum of problems, from the datafication of companies and geopolitics to levels of inequality and people today moving into cities, a trend now taking place at prices unseen in human history.
My recommendation comes with the caveat that this book is co-written by a retired basic and is much less crucial of the military’s history of influence on the field of AI than other books on this list, like Artificial Whiteness.
Data Feminism
Data Feminism encourages people today to adopt a framework informed by direct encounter primarily based on intersectional feminism and co-liberation. Throughout the book, authors Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein concentrate on the work of Black female scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw. Notable endorsers of the book consist of Algorithms of Oppression author Dr. Safiya Noble, Race After Technology author Dr. Ruha Benjamin, and DJ Patil, who coined the title “data scientist” and was the 1st White House chief information scientist.
The hype about huge information and AI, the coauthors create, is “deafeningly male and white and techno-heroic.” They add that “the time is now to reframe that world with a feminist lens.”
Written by two white girls, Data Feminism acknowledges that people today who encounter privilege can be unaware of oppression skilled by other people today, anything the authors term “privilege hazard.”
“The work of data feminism is first to tune into how standard practices in data science serve to reinforce these existing inequities and second to use data science to challenge and change the distribution of power,” the authors create. “Our overarching goal is to take a stand against the status quo — against a world that benefits us, two white women college professors, at the expense of others. To work toward that goal, we have chosen to feature the voices of those who speak from the margins.”
The book describes situations when information is utilised to prove inequality, ranging from Christine Darden’s encounter at NASA to Joy Buolamwini’s crucial work analyzing industrial facial recognition systems. The authors detail ongoing efforts to redress inequities, which includes the Library of Missing Datasets and other work to collect information that governments do not gather. The book additional asserts that governmental information collection is normally a reflection of who has energy and who does not. Examples consist of a femicide information-gathering project in Mexico that follows in the footsteps of Ida B. Wells’ work to collect information about lynchings of Black people today in the U.S
Data Feminism was released in February and was written for information scientists interested in the methods that intersectional feminism can move the profession toward justice and support feminists embrace information science. The authors strive for inclusion and note that the book is not only for girls.
The book joins a quantity of operates introduced this year that urge people today to consider differently about approaches to creating artificial intelligence. During the Resistance AI workshop at the NeurIPS AI investigation conference earlier this week, the authors shared the seven principles of information feminism. A quantity of AI ethics researchers have also known as on information scientists to center the experiences of marginalized communities when designing AI systems and to think about the harm AI systems can inflict on such groups.
Researchers from Google’s DeepMind known as for decolonizing AI in order to stay clear of making AI systems that create exploitation or oppression, a message echoed by investigation on information colonization in Africa. There’s also work calling for AI informed by the philosophy of ubuntu, which acknowledges the methods people today are interconnected. Queer and indigenous AI frameworks had been also introduced this year.
Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures
Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures was written by Georgia Tech digital tech associate professor André Brock Jr., who previously contributed to Black Futures with a short essay about why social media network BlackPlanet was a social media network pioneer.
Distributed Blackness incorporates an exploration of digital spaces like Black Twitter and covers some of the early entrepreneurs who constructed the 1st Black on the web spaces in the 1990s. Brock wrote that his book is meant to hark back to The Negro Motorist Green Book, which helped Black people today travel and collect in secure spaces when traveling across the United States.
“I am arguing that Black folks’ ‘natural internet affinity’ is as much about how they understand and employ digital artifacts and practices as it is about how Blackness is constituted within the material (and virtual) world of the internet itself. I am naming these Black digital practices as Black cyberculture,” Brock Jr. writes.
He says Black digital practices consist of “libidinal online expressions and practices of joy and catharsis about being Black.” He also examines types of on the web activity Brock refers to as “ratchet digital practice.” He defines ratchery as the enactment and functionality of ratchet behavior and aesthetics.
Examples consist of inventive Twitter show names like Optimus Fine, Zora Neale Hustlin’, and Auntie Hot Flash Summer. Brock also explains why the book omits examples of ratchery like “WorldStar!” and why he defines that with class problems in Black America and the work of W.E.B. DuBois in thoughts. The book also attempts to examine things influential to the Black digital encounter, like the reality that roughly 55% of Black people today have household broadband but 80% have smartphones.
One of the greatest elements of this book is that it ruptures the thought of the world wide web and people today in technologies operating on a white default and provides a pointed critique of a tech culture that treats white as the norm and everybody else as “other.” It also requires a close — and at occasions crucial — appear at Afrofuturism, which Brock calls “an alternative path to analyzing Black technoculture.”
Algorithms do briefly come up in the book, but Distributed Blackness is not genuinely a book about AI. It’s an exploration of Black expression and creativity on the web, an examination of technoculture as the “interweaving of technology, culture, self, and identity.”
This book’s vernacular bounces comfortably among academic terminology and social media references, and terminology produced by Brock. That can make components of the book hard to study, but it is rewarding. Distributed Blackness produced me cackle at occasions and consider at other occasions.
Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism Is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World
We’ve all heard the marketing and advertising pitch: The sensible device, sensible car or truck, sensible household, and sensible city will enhance your life. But Too Smart author Jathan Sadowski argues that sensible tech’s modest conveniences are what you get in exchange for not asking also quite a few inquiries about a globe complete of information-collecting machines connected to the world wide web.
“This book will be called dystopian. It might even be accused of alarmism. Such reactions are to be expected in a culture that teaches us to trust in technology’s benevolent power,” he writes.
Sadowski notes that more than time, people today get utilised to “offending events” or privacy violations that come with sensible tech, which he says offers companies the potential to manage, handle, and manipulate people today. Smart tech, Sadowski writes, prioritizes the interests of corporate technocratic energy more than democratic rights and the social great. He argues that tech is not neutral and that the query is not whether or not it is political but what the politics behind it are.
“The key concern is not with control itself but rather with who has control over whom,” he writes. These organizations “are technocrats creating systems that shape society and govern people. By neglecting the politics of smart tech, we allow powerful interests to reside in the shadows and exercise undue influence over our lives.”
The sensible globe, also occasionally referred to as the world wide web of factors (IoT), has grown from 8 billion devices in 2017 to 20 billion in 2020. The surveillance and potential to energy systems of manage and manipulation can fundamentally reshape society, Sadowski writes, and kind the foundation of capitalism in a digitized globe.
As he notes, information collected via sensible devices can be utilised to predict customer interests and upsell solutions or services, as is the case with Amazon’s recommendation systems, or energy applications for the increasing sensible city sector.
Sadowski is crucial of deterministic views of technopolitics since he believes such an method cedes energy to executives, engineers, and entrepreneurs.
Too Smart calls datafication a kind of violence and says organizations like Amazon and Google want to turn out to be, to borrow a phrase Tom Wolfe utilised to describe Wall Street titans in the 1980s, “masters of the universe.”
One of my favourite components of this book is a chapter in which Sadowski information sensible tech deployments in big U.S. cities and argues that when people today consider of sensible cities, they require to consider about New Orleans, not depictions of futuristic metropolises. New Orleans has a history of working with surveillance organizations like Palantir and utilizing predictive policing. In 2018, The Verge teamed up with The Investigative Fund to report that the New Orleans Police Department’s work with Palantir was such a closely kept secret that members of the city council didn’t even know about it. Earlier this month, the New Orleans City Council voted to place in location a ban on facial recognition and predictive policing tools.
If you do not trust the “smart” agenda for houses and cities or are concerned about increasing prices of AI-powered surveillance technologies utilised by democratic and authoritarian governments, you may want to study Too Smart.
Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology
Girl Decoded is a book Affectiva CEO Rana el Kaliouby wrote about her journey from increasing up in Cairo, Egypt to developing a U.S.-primarily based corporation that utilizes AI to classify human emotion. Full disclosure: I moderated an onstage conversation at an Affectiva conference in 2018 in Boston.
It could be the quantity of AI-associated reading and writing I do, but what stood out to me wasn’t the technical elements per se, even though I did appreciate el Kaliouby divulging that as a consequence of her work she has a deep expertise of the muscle tissues accountable for facial expressions.
The book is about emotional intelligence, so I guess it is predictable that I enjoyed reading about el Kaliouby’s family members, her faith, and her journey to beginning a corporation. Girl Decoded also information how el Kaliouby ended up in Boston working with people today like MIT Media Lab professor and Affective Computing Group leader Rosalind Picard.
While Girl Decoded focuses on the possibilities of emotional intelligence tech, AI practitioners and researchers have raised inquiries about the validity of utilizing AI to predict human emotion. And a paper not too long ago accepted to the Fairness, Accountability, and Fairness conference (FAccT) inquiries the field of affective computing.
But el Kaliouby argues that ethical emotional intelligence can advantage society. Examples variety from assisting people today on the autism spectrum recognize human emotion and interact with other individuals to recognizing when a driver is experiencing road rage or drowsiness or is otherwise distracted, a threat that has turn out to be more frequent given that the advent of the smartphone.
She also writes about how shoppers can punish corporations that engage in unethical behavior, like organizations promoting technologies to spy on ethnic minorities:
You will also hear about how robots can modify human behavior in optimistic methods. For instance, Mabu is a household robot that utilizes Affectiva’s emotional intelligence to evaluate the responses of patients dealing with congestive heart failure. Its AI is educated utilizing information from an American Heart Association expertise graph to answer a patient’s inquiries. Affectiva has also been utilised for SoftBank Robotics’ Pepper and to scan the faces of shoppers watching ads in a supermarket setting.
This may be a great book for entrepreneurs interested in examining the arc of a founder’s story or any person curious to hear arguments in favor of emotion recognition systems and human-centric technologies.
Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence
Since I study the previously described paper about “The Whiteness of AI” earlier this year, I anticipated to hear more about the effect on science fiction and pop culture, but this is not that book. Artificial Whiteness was written by Yarden Katz, a fellow in the Harvard Medical School Department of Systems Biology and an MIT graduate.
The book delivers a view of AI history not via considerable technical advances, but via moments of collaboration among academia, sector, and government. It also examines the influence of an AI specialist sector produced up of the media, consider tanks, and universities.
Artificial Whiteness references scholars like Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison, and W.E.B. DuBois, but that comes in later chapters. It starts with a history of artificial intelligence in academia and its early ties to military funding. In exploring AI’s roots, Katz talks about how the term “artificial intelligence” is as significantly a marketing and advertising term as it is a field of laptop science and sector.
“The all too real consequences of whiteness come from its connection to concrete systems of power. From colonial America to the present, whiteness has been intertwined with capitalist conceptions of property inscribed into law,” the book reads. “AI’s new progressive rebranding is not a real departure from the field’s imperial roots but rather an adaptation to changing political sensibilities.”
Katz writes about how whiteness is utilised to sustain oppressive relations, but you will hear more about Henry Kissinger, geopolitics, and efforts to keep American dominance in the 1st one hundred pages than the social hierarchy of white supremacy.
Among options Katz provides are acts of refusal, which he argues can be generative. Examples of this consist of early AI researchers Terry Winograd and Joseph Weizenbaum, who produced a point of refusing military funding. Today, AI researchers have also refused to take cash from Google.
“When the neoliberal logic surrounding the university pushes for more partnerships, more interdisciplinary collaboration, and the creation of more institutes that naturalize the military-industrial-academic machine, it seems to me that a different disposition — one of refusal — becomes even more essential,” Katz writes.
This is a book about how white supremacy can be identified at the roots of artificial intelligence, an ongoing influence confirmed by hyperlinks among AI startups and white supremacists. It’s also about naming effective forces in the sector, like AI authorities and universities. And the book offers readers insight into the integral part marketing and advertising played and continues to play in the history of AI, a partnership that comes to thoughts anytime a survey finds 40% of AI startups do not really use AI in methods material to their business enterprise.
Final thoughts
It ought to come as no surprise to any person who consistently follows my work, but the nine books I study this year touch on policy, discrimination, human rights violations, and harms that can be brought on by artificial intelligence deployment. I attempt to hold these insights in thoughts when I hear Microsoft is working on tech to allow e-carceration or when organizations make claims about the efficacy of an AI technique.
I’m currently hunting forward to Your Computer Is on Fire, a collection of stories about how to repair a broken computing sector. Know a book that I ought to study to inform my reporting about artificial intelligence in 2021 or I ought to have study this year? You can send me a DM on Twitter @kharijohnson or send me an e-mail.