AI is also a publishing boom

This text belongs to the 'Artificial' newsletter.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
07 December 2023 Thursday 09:26
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AI is also a publishing boom

This text belongs to the 'Artificial' newsletter. If you want to receive it in your mailbox every Friday, sign up here.

Bookstores and online book platforms are full of books on artificial intelligence. The editorial overproduction in the last twelve months, in most cases driven by the appearance of ChatGPT, includes everything from practical guides on the use of generative AIs, to more complete works, with historical tours and complete explanations about it. technology. Here are three very different and interesting volumes that, together, offer a very broad perspective on this technology.

To really understand everything that artificial intelligence encompasses, there are some books that can offer a global perspective on the implications of this technology. One is AI Atlas (Ned Ediciones), by Kate Crawford, a prominent research professor at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles and principal researcher at the Microsoft Research Lab in New York. The author worked on the project for ten years after data extraction. In her story it is known how this technology influences the mining exploitation of rare earths, the scarcity of resources, the exploitation of labor and "the strategies underlying the dominance of a technology that perpetuates power and its social and economic biases." cultural".

One of the most interesting and useful books of the latest batch is that of Professor Ramon López de Mántaras, emeritus research professor of the Higher Scientific Research Council (CSIC) at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA), of which he was director. . This is 100 things you need to know about artificial intelligence (Cossetània), which is in its second edition in Catalan. This work provides a necessary context to understand everything that AI means and what its historical context has been. The work of López de Mántaras raises questions from all points of view, from ethics to technique. A useful reference that would encourage even those people not familiar with Catalan to read.

Sociologist Susan Schneider is the author of Artificial Intelligence. A philosophical exploration of the future of mind and technology (Kōan Editions). This academic studies the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, ethics, metaphysics and astrobiology. She is the founder of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, where she also holds the William F. Dietrich Chair. Schneider has also been the holder of the NASA/Library of Congress Baruch S. Blumberg Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration and Scientific Innovation at NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the United States Library of Congress. Consciousness is one of the keys that we will study in the coming years in relation to AI and a subject on which Schneider makes interesting reflections.