Book Review: The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want (2025). Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading lately on the topic of AI (Artificial Intelligence). AI is naturally interesting to me as a former IT and tech person, but also because its apparent rapid development, economic and employment impacts and its social policy implications are so much in the news at the moment. I have two or three more new books on this topic on my library list and bookshelf at the moment, but today I want to discuss one I’ve already read.

The book is entitled The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna. Dr. Bender is a professor of Linguistics, and affiliate faculty in Computer Science and Linguistics at the University of Washington, who often consults with domestic and international organizations on understanding "AI" technologies. Dr. Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, and a lecturer at the School of Information at UC Berkeley.

This book is a dense, thorough critique of the entire field of "AI", coming at it from many different levels and angles. It discusses the financial and political motivations of AI’s main proponents, its foundation in intellectual property theft, and the essential fraudulence of the hype that what has been created in these software products is "intelligence". It compares the hype around AI to other tech bubbles of the past, and discusses both the need and some methods for resisting the inclusion of AI features in many of our common computer and internet applications.

The book explores many of the adverse effects on society that can be expected from further implementations of AI in many arenas, including job automation and job loss, misplaced legitimization of discriminatory social policies, climate change impacts from massive data center requirements, destructive effects on many types of careers and human creative endeavors, and many more.

I mentioned in another review recently that I have some skepticism and doubt about the current clamor over AI and all the things it can do. This book clarifies and supports my uneasiness over much of what the public has been hearing lately about AI from the wealthy tech moguls who are promoting it.

One interesting dynamic the authors describe is the way the tech leaders seem to fall into two opposing camps about the promise and perils of AI. There are the “boomers” (or accelerationists), who claim that AI will deliver untold wealth, intellectual capacity and scientific benefits to humanity in the very near future, which is why we must do whatever it takes to develop it quickly. And then there are the “doomers”, who make much of their belief that AI will soon reach the “Singularity”, where the machines will outstrip humanity’s ability to  reason, and may then consign us all to the dustbin of history, as in the Terminator films.

What the authors note about these two camps is that they both tend to be largely made up of people who are within the small circles of rich high-tech corporate leadership. In fact, the two conflicting views of AI’s risk/reward profiles are often present in the same people.

In one breath, they argue that they need to go all-in quickly on investing in and developing AI as fast as possible, for all the positive benefits they foresee. Then they turn around and say that they are the only ones who can be trusted to protect us from the potential disastrous AI outcomes they fear. Sam Altman and Elon Musk are prime examples of this sort of warring visions within one person, with their self-serving rationalizations for going ahead and doing whatever they want to do, despite all the dire risks to humanity they’ve predicted.

Both the book authors are active in the research fields of AI, and are not blind to the enormous potential economic and social benefits that may result from AI developments. At the same time, they see right through the breathless claims of the AI proponents, which is that AGI – Artificial General Intelligence, or machines that can think as humans do – is just around the corner.

They point out that this claim about impending AGI has been made repeatedly for over fifty years, and they share some of the history of that. But as they explain, the technical approach behind current generative AI (like ChatGPT), based on large language models and neural networks, is still basically a parlor trick, seemingly displaying magical “intelligence” that is in fact produced by an inanimate but sophisticated prediction engine.

AI doesn’t think, and it doesn’t feel, according to the authors, and they contend that with current models and approaches, it’s not likely to do so anytime soon. What generative AI does do is leverage existing human intelligence, creativity, art and information stored as data to seemingly “create” new text and images, based on content taken without compensation from the many people  who originally created it.

This is not intelligence, say the authors – it is merely theft and repurposing on a colossal scale. And it is theft that allows those who own and control the vast computing resources needed for AI tools to function, to profit and extract great value from the fruits of human creativity and labor they’ve stolen from others, and used to train their AI models. 

One of the most telling points the authors make is that an unacknowledged but very high priority of the AI moguls seems to be to use these smart machines to eliminate costly humans from the workforce. Everyone knows by now that AI is a potential threat to many existing jobs, especially in the white collar service industries, but that’s not something the AI hype merchants want to emphasize. Or so I assumed, until on a recent trip to San Francisco I saw billboards advertising a new AI product with the slogan “Never hire a human again”. Perhaps in the current political moment, these tech leaders no longer even feel they need to hide their desire to take away peoples' livelihoods for the sake of their bottom lines. 

After thoroughly pulling back the veil on all the hype, the lies and flawed reasoning behind the “AI con”, the authors lay out some reasonable if limited ideas for how to resist the AI juggernaut. For example, they suggest not using AI agents to query for information when a simple web search would give comparable results.

The authors suggest this for several reasons: first, because widespread refusal to use new AI products might slow investment and further development in them; second, because these AI agents have vastly greater environmental and climate change overhead associated with using them compared to a simple web search; and third, because the AI answers might be made up, and don’t tend to provide their sources, or any attribution for how they arrived at their conclusions.

With a web search, you know where the information is coming from, and can draw your own conclusions about its validity, reliability and truthfulness. You also might discover some unexpected but valuable information farther down the page of search results. With an AI agent search, you have to just take it on faith that the AI didn’t make it up, but which it often does (popularly known as “hallucinating”, although the authors reject that term for its implicit hint of actual machine cognition).

Of course, as the authors are aware, resisting the hype and the promotional campaigns being waged for AI by the leaders of our largest tech companies will be difficult. And there is a need not to throw out all AI and advanced computing innovations that might truly be beneficial to humanity, although how lay people are supposed to distinguish between what is worthwhile and what is wasteful or dangerous among the many new AI products being released is hard to know.

The ultimate message the authors seem to hope readers will take away from their in-depth presentation is that if we’re going to have AI technologies at all, they need to be limited, regulated and well-controlled, and in the service of humanity’s greater good and noblest aspirations, not the science fiction-based fantasies and greed of a small group of wealthy tech entrepreneurs.

That all makes sense to me. Highly recommended.  

Book Review: Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (2022). Chris Miller.

I was intrigued this morning to read an article about a growing problem in the latest iterations of new generative AI products. This problem has been recognized and widely discussed for the last several years, but apparently in many cases, it’s not being solved as the AI software and systems become more sophisticated and complex. Apparently it’s getting worse, much worse. That problem is “hallucination”, the tendency of AI systems to make up “facts” in response to queries. 

 

When I read news like that, it tends to support a gut feeling of mine that the current hype about AI and how it’s going to change everything for the better is at the very least overblown, and perhaps completely wrong, a sci-fi fantasy from our tech leaders’ childhoods that in reality could become a dystopian, dangerous nightmare, rather than a wondrous achievement for humanity. But that’s a larger topic for another time.

 

In the meantime, our current computer systems, our phones, the internet and all the electronic information technologies of our era have become indispensable resources for every aspect of our lives, at work and at play. Through the accumulated scientific knowledge and engineering of the recent past, these things all exist, and most of us take them for granted. We don’t tend to think about them that much, but perhaps we should.

 

Most of us probably don’t think about how critical computer automation has become to our survival, as more and more of our societal life support systems, our roads, our airspace, our banking system, our hospitals, our communications and so many other parts of modern society are put under computer control. Very few of us actually know much about how these things came to be, how they work, or what it takes to keep turning out the steadily more powerful automation products we all use and rely upon.

 

This is why Chris Miller’s book Chip War is the essential book for understanding many aspects of our current situation. It starts at the beginning, telling the history of the invention of the transistor, soon followed by the development of the integrated circuit (known as a “chip”), a small electronic component onto which many transistors can be printed using a highly refined photo imaging process. He also provides a clear description for the lay reader on how these inventions function, and why they are essential to the creation of computers and the internet.

 

From that necessary introduction, he then tells a much longer and more complicated story about how the initial inventions were steadily improved and disseminated around the world over the past half-century. He focuses on important individuals at each stage of development, and how certain companies and countries competed to dominate different aspects of both ongoing creation of better chip designs, and the actual production of the chips based on the designs.

 

As someone with a long history in IT and computers myself, I knew some of what was in this riveting and important book, but I learned so much more, and it was fascinating.

 

Miller talks about the different approaches taken by important countries over the decades to try to gain access to the newest and best designs and products coming out of the U.S.A. For example, he traces how the Soviet Union and then Russia after the Soviet Union’s collapse tried to simply steal the latest technology from the West, both the designs and often the chips themselves. As he explains, this has kept Russia consistently a decade behind the United States and Europe in the types and quality of chips it could produce or consume in mass.

 

In China, however, they took a different route. While trying to build up their own research and development capabilities, the Chinese focused on creating advanced manufacturing for some types of chips, especially memory chips, as well as building factories to create integrated products like circuit boards, and consumer products like PCs, laptops, and smartphones. It wasn’t that they didn’t also steal the latest Western technology whenever they could, but they did vastly more than Russia to also develop their own advanced research and manufacturing capabilities. As a result, they own or dominate some important segments of the global chip manufacturing and high-tech product market.

 

In the United States, where the technology was invented, the top companies dominated most or all aspects of creating the latest, most advanced chips for several decades. But over time, some of the premier companies were out-competed by a few companies in other countries, and merged or went out of business.

 

The United States, particularly with companies like Intel and AMD,  still retains dominance in the development of the new designs for the latest generations of chips, but several other countries now have companies in that race. In the meantime, the United States, and almost all other countries, have ceded control over the production of the most vital chips – the CPUs, or Central Processing Units that control the operations of all computers – to a single country, Taiwan, and to a single company there that has been willing to make the huge investments in equipment and facilities required to be able to produce the current and near-future generations of processor chips.

 

The story of how that happened, how the United States and its premier chip companies lost the ability to manufacture its most vital computing components after designing them is just one fascinating tale from this exhaustive history of the chip industry. And it is an absolutely vital story to know and understand, in order to better comprehend some major political issues we now face.

 

For example, knowing that Taiwan is the world’s sole source for producing the latest and best CPU chips explains why the question of China’s desire to take back control of Taiwan, and the West’s need to prevent that has become such a perennially vital national security issue for the United States. Being aware of this situation also explains why all recent American administrations have wanted to bring chip manufacturing back to the U.S.A., with only limited success.

 

Chip War is filled with these sorts of “how did we not know this?” stories and background. It also drives home as few other things I’ve read, how absolutely dependent we have become on computer chips, on the same level of importance as the oil and energy resources that drive our economy. It’s also a very enlightening history of the brilliant people, the companies and countries that have created and improved these magical little devices that are now embedded in so much of the smart environment in which we now live. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Heat Will Kill You First. Jeff Goodell (2023).

I read this climate change non-fiction book some months ago, and it’s taken me a while to get around to writing a review of it, but I believe it's still an important review to write and share. The author, Jeff Goodell, is an editor for Rolling Stone magazine who has written several environmental “travelogues” of sorts, which combine accounts of his eco-tourism trips (for journalistic research purposes) with focused discussions of specific elements or results of the climate change phenomenon, the effects of which he observes and recounts from his travels.

In one of his other books, for example, he did a global review of the impact of rising seas from melting ice on Earth’s geography, mankind and our technological civilizations. In this one, he looks at the impacts and feedback loops of rising atmospheric and oceanic temperatures.

 

He begins with an introduction and an overview about a fact which most of us already know and acknowledge is happening: the earth is warming rapidly due to our reliance on burning fossil fuels for much of the energy that powers our societies. He then gives some well-chosen examples of calamitous effects of heat which we are already seeing around us.

 

Next, he moves on to the topic of the effects of heat on the human body. He begins with the particularly grisly and heartbreaking story of a young California couple a few years ago who died with their infant child on a backpacking trip when they failed to plan for the dangers of heat exposure during a family day hike. From this, he moves on to clinical descriptions of how rising heat affects the human body, and how it will soon make increasing numbers of currently-inhabited places around the world no longer fit for habitation, particularly during the warmer months of the year.    

 

From there, the author provides well-researched and organized chapters on a number of other aspects of the effect of rising temperatures on the world. In one chapter, he explores the threat to crops and global food supplies. In another, he discusses the increasingly dangerous effects of heat on outdoors workers, including how extreme heat might prevent the delivery of crucial services in the future. He also explains why we need to develop new work health and safety standards to protect our essential workers who must work outside in hot weather from the extreme heat conditions of the near future.

 

Another chapter provides a close-up look at Antarctica, and the particular dangers to the planet from melting ice there, especially including the potential for sea level rise. He also reviews some of the scientific and engineering ideas that have been proposed to try to slow down and minimize the damage from warming on the polar ice fields and glaciers.

 

Goodell then proceeds on to hotter climes, and raises the problem of tropical insects like mosquitoes and ticks now on the move into many warming temperate zones. He analyzes the extent to which those insect migrations to new ranges will likely spread tropical diseases and epidemics into new regions and human populations, ones which haven’t previously been affected by these problems.

 

In another interesting chapter, he provides a description of how air conditioning works, and how current air conditioning technology actually makes the heat situation worse, both from burning fossil fuels to power them, and because of the heat released in the air conditioning process, but is still necessary to make many parts of the world habitable during the warm season of the year.

 

Toward the end of the book, he moves more toward creative problem-solving, by attempting to identify ways we can adapt to and survive the ongoing rising heat which seems inevitable. For instance, he talks about large-scale “heat events”, like the high pressure “heat dome” that has been over much of the country this summer, and asks whether we should start naming and tracking these high-heat extreme weather events the way we do tropical storms and hurricanes. He goes on to propose some possible approaches and ideas about what it would take to retrofit our modern urban areas for heat survivability in the near future.

 

Much of what is in this book has been in the news in various forms for years for those who are paying attention, as the age of human-caused climate change has settled upon us. However, the author has done a very nice job of focusing the conversation on the heat-related elements of the problem. He does it by taking us on a world tour to see some of the areas where rising temperatures are having early effects, analyzing how the various elements and impacts of rising temperatures fit together, and reporting on some of the means by which we humans may try to mitigate and adapt to the worst environmental effects of rising temperatures around the globe.

 

This is an excellent primer on the coming crisis of heat, and rising air temperatures around the world. Recommended.

Book Review: Bitch: On the Female of the Species. Lucy Cooke (2023).

One of my favorite reads in late 2023 was Bitch, Lucy Cooke’s marvelous exploration of sex and gender in evolution and the natural world.  

 

The author is a young academic biologist, who entered the field already discouraged by the story that both science and society had to tell about her sex, the female one.  Her perception had always been that being born a female was to be a “loser” – smaller, less interesting and more passive than the much more exciting and empowered males of the world.

 

Fortunately, though, as she began to enter the world of science and research, she made a number of discoveries that dramatically changed her outlook on the scientific establishment, its history, and its stories about sex and gender. These discoveries included a myriad of counter-examples to the “facts” that were believed to be universal about sex differences in humans and many other species. The author takes us along for a funny and surprising tour of what she has learned.

 

Of course, we humans have always been fascinated with sex, the differences between the sexes, and we all have our own opinions about the relationships between the two sexes. More recently, modern society has also become particularly curious about a more fluid gender spectrum, and how certain traits may overlap in male and female populations. 

 

Religion traditionally has had much to say about these issues too, but Cooke begins by taking a look at how the biological sciences, particularly since the time of Charles Darwin in the mid-19^th century, have been dominated by a blindered view that generally reflected the Victorian social morals, self-interest and ignorance of the small group of mostly-English, mostly-white men who were developing the “scientific” understanding and assumptions in the new fields of biology and evolution almost from inception.

 

She explains all this with a light touch, using examples and giving explanations drawn from major studies and research approaches that have characterized the field. She shares specific historical examples of how and when major male figures in the biological sciences over the past two centuries appeared to incorporate their own insular personal beliefs about human sex roles and differences into broader “scientific” conclusions that all females in nature (of whatever species) tended to be smaller and weaker than males, more passive, invariably focused on child-rearing and nurturing, usually monogamous, and generally looking like their idealized version of an upper-class Victorian woman in their patriarchal society.

 

Having set out her hypothesis, the author then takes us on a tour of many different species, and shows how time and again, the predominantly male investigators who studied them either overlooked or explained away obvious cases that contradicted the orthodox view of sex differences and sex selection, and also neglected to even devote any attention to studying female anatomies, behaviors and social roles in the species they studied, on the assumption that the females were unimportant compared to the males.

 

For example, Cooke is able to demonstrate that since the 19^th century, the mostly male biologists in the field have exhaustively studied and documented the male reproductive organs of many species, but until recently there was very little research done on the corresponding female organs. She provides humorous anecdotes of how male biologists totally misunderstood the significance of unusual penis configurations, sizes and sexual functionality in different creatures, because they had never bothered to look at the vaginas and clitorises of the females.

 

In the course of this book, you will learn many strange and wonderful things about how evolution has led to an almost endless variety of different sex roles, relationships between the sexes, and bizarre sex-linked characteristics in the natural world. In her words, few species (including humans and our mammalian cousins) are the same as others, or conform to the simplistic male-dominant assumptions with which we have all grown up. And in understanding this, we get a much more consistent and predictably complex view of how evolution works with respect to sex differences and characteristics.

 

Cooke also introduces us to a few of her intriguing and determined older female colleagues in the field of biology, and shares stories of some of their groundbreaking work, which first began to challenge the Darwinian/male consensus on sex differences and sex selection in the field.

 

Incidentally, another book also released in late 2023, Cat Bohannon’s Eve: How the Female Body Drove Over 200 Million Years of Evolution, appears from the description to cover similar topics and issues. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on my 2024 reading list. 

 

For anyone who loves to think about sex and gender, sex differences (and similarities), and/or to argue about them, Bitch will provide you with a great deal to think about, and plenty of ammunition for future conversations and debates. It may be controversial to some people, but it’s also often humorous, while posing serious and well-reasoned challenges to our current scientific understanding and perspectives on these matters, as well as how they impact our human societies, norms and beliefs. Highly recommended.