Book Review: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism. Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025).

Several years ago, I read and reviewed an excellent book from 2016 about Silicon Valley and particularly Facebook called Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine  by Antonio Garcia Martinez. It was a memoir by a former Wall Street trader who moved to California around 2010, and jumped into the high tech investment world. In addition to many interesting and appalling stories of the people and bad behavior he encountered along the way, Martinez’s story stood out for its clear presentation of how the electronic markets in personal data for advertising work at places like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram, and what it’s like to work in those high-tech corporate environments. 

With Sarah Wynn-Williams' splendid new tell-all memoir about life in the upper ranks of Facebook’s leadership, Careless People, we now have an even more gripping, often shocking but highly readable insider’s account of the people who have built and now control the world’s most powerful social media company, and the lawless and corrupt practices that have made Facebook and Meta the destructive forces they have become in modern society. Some of these outrages have already been investigated and publicized in the news media, but Wynn-Williams’ story takes it to a whole new level of factual detail and disillusioning personal experience.

 

The author’s origin story is an unusual one. The childhood survivor of a near-fatal shark attack in her native New Zealand, she grew up to become an idealistic young lawyer and diplomat who discovered Facebook around 2009. She was immediately enthralled by the possibilities the social media app presented for promoting open communications between people and communities, resisting authoritarian regimes (as seemed to be happening during the “Arab Spring” at that time), and generally being a new and important force for social good in the world.

 

With that hopeful and idealistic perspective, she spent more than a year trying to find an “in” at the relatively new Facebook company, so she could pitch her idea for a job she wanted to do there: director of global public policy. At first, she made little progress, because the top management hadn’t even considered the idea that Facebook had the potential to run into many kinds of legal conflict, complex policy issues and resistance from political leaders in countries around the world. But eventually, through sheer persistence, she was able to talk herself into the job she had invented, and began to work regularly with Facebook’s top leadership, including Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and others. 

 

As she describes it, Wynn-Williams began filled with hopes for herself and her new career, imagining a useful role at Facebook where she could use her training and experience in international law and diplomacy to help make the company and its products a force for positive change around the world. With these goals in mind, she began encouraging Mark Zuckerberg to start trying to make personal connections with important global leaders, in order to create favorable conditions for promoting Facebook’s apps and the company in countries around the world.

 

She brought her diplomatic skills and experience to bear, trying to set up meetings, handle protocol, and prep the boss for what should be discussed in those meetings with world leaders and other CEOs. It turned out that wasn’t so easy, since Zuckerberg at this early stage was uncomfortable meeting new people, hated politics, didn’t think he needed to know anything or be prepared for these meetings in advance, and basically wanted someone else to deal with it all. Nevertheless, Wynn-Williams kept trying.

 

She also became part of the circle of young women staffers around Sheryl Sandberg. She soon found herself  recruited along with other female staff to do non-company work promoting Sandberg’s book Lean In, helping to manage all the attendant glory and publicity Sandberg received as a supposed feminist success story, the powerful professional woman and visionary corporate leader who could balance work and family, and “have it all”. But the author soon realized that Sheryl could “have it all” mainly because of her stupendous wealth, her paid full-time childcare staff, and her ability at work to compel others to do things for her, without regard for the toll that might take on her assistants, or the appropriateness of having Facebook pay for these personal services for her.

 

What makes Wynn-Williams’ story so compelling are the harrowing daily personal experiences and interactions she describes, and the insights she has on what she had to do to try to survive and succeed in this toxic work environment. She describes a work culture where having children and families is something to be essentially hidden from supervisors, where insane work hours and demands on personal time are normal expectations of employees by upper management. She recounts going through several pregnancies during her time at Facebook, one with calamitous damage to her health, and reveals how her bosses still expected her to be working from home or going on foreign trips, even during her maternity leave and an extended period of physical recovery.

 

The author also gives chilling descriptions of ongoing sexual harassment, both from her male boss Joel Kaplan and from Sheryl Sandberg, who Wynn-Williams claims tried to force her to go to bed with Sandberg during a long international flight on a private jet. Wynn-Williams describes many of the things she did at work for years to try to stay out of trouble and under the radar of top leadership, while also trying to report and resist wrongdoing, whether it was about sexual harassment, or her repeated objections to the business’s policies and practices when they appeared to be immoral, corrupt, illegal or just plain stupid.

 

The author confirms Mark Zuckerberg’s widely reported rage at having Facebook blamed by the press for Donald Trump’s stunning 2016 upset victory. Zuckerberg apparently felt Facebook was being unjustly accused and defamed, at least until his own managers explained to him all the powerful software and data tools for voter manipulation they had used on Trump’s behalf. He then ended up testifying in Congress, and with the support of his staff, lied about and obfuscated the company’s extensive consulting work for the Trump campaign, and its powerful effects, according to Wynn-Williams.

 

Later in the book, Wynn-Williams also delves into details of Facebook’s attempts to win its way into the Chinese market, which became one of Zuckerberg’s top priorities in his relentless quest for more customers. According to her account, the Facebook leadership appeared untroubled by what it concluded was the need to collaborate with China’s authoritarian government in providing spying capabilities against its own population, if that would advance the company’s interests. The author claims they were also perfectly willing to lie to the U.S. government about the extent of their cooperation with the Xi regime, and lie to the Xi regime about their covert attempts to penetrate the market without meeting the Chinese government’s legal requirements. She provides numerous examples to back up these claims.

 

Another shocking reveal was the fact that marketing teams at Facebook had developed advertising decks to promote their abilities to target 13-17 year old girls with signs of emotional distress (as contained in their posts) for advertising that would take advantage of the psychologically vulnerable state of those girls. Of course, when Facebook was caught out on this, and hauled before Congress to explain, the company’s leadership lied, and denied they had those capabilities. But they did, and they were promoting and selling those capabilities to customers, who wanted to advertise products like weight loss aids and beauty products to under-age girls in crisis.

 

Ultimately, after most of a decade in the upper echelons of the Facebook hierarchy, the author’s attempts to encourage Facebook to do the right things in different situations, whether in the realm of international law and policy, or in dealing with employee harassment by top leaders, ended with her being fired. None of the leaders responsible for all these problems apologized to her, or acknowledged any wrongdoing. They just got rid of her, which is of course what they are still hoping to do now, by suggesting the author is just a disgruntled fired employee with emotional problems and a “sour grapes” grudge against the company. 

 

I saw a news report that Facebook’s and Meta’s leadership really did not want this book to be published, and it’s obvious why not after reading it. It’s potentially a devastating blow to the Facebook and Meta brands, not to mention the reputations of people like Zuckerberg and Sandberg. But I’m convinced that Wynn-Williams is telling the truth about this crew of “careless people”. She paints a very believable and by-now familiar picture of the toxic high-tech corporate culture they’ve created, and shows how their vast wealth, unchecked ambition and lack of any moral compass or empathy for others on a routine basis has led them to launch these destructive social media applications out into the world, with little concern for their adverse effects on individuals or society.

 

I know there has been enough negative press and analysis about Facebook and Meta in the past few years that many people might not want to hear any more about it. But this book is essential for really understanding the extent of the cynicism, greed and corruption at the heart of Meta and its leadership, and the negative effects that has had on the politics of our time, our attention and our social lives.

 

It’s also a riveting read, and a compelling personal story of survival and endurance in the face of adversity, disillusionment and loss. Very 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: Abundance (2025). Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson.

I have long been an admirer of Ezra Klein, his writing and his New York Times podcast The Ezra Klein Show. In my opinion, he is one of the most influential public intellectuals in American life today, because of his deep and wide knowledge of politics and public policy, his unflagging curiosity about life and the way the world works, and his excellence as an interviewer of other important thinkers, whether he agrees with their opinions or not.

What demonstrates to me his importance as a thought leader is the number of times his writings and podcasts have introduced important and original new ideas that have overcome initial pushback and skepticism to eventually be widely recognized as true and important insights, at least by the liberal-minded part of the population.

In Why We’re Polarized (2020), Klein did a deep dive into the data about social divisions in American society, finding both new and surprising explanations for our political and social polarization, and identifying forces and effects (particularly in our media environments) that are further destabilizing our democratic political systems.

Then in early 2024, he shocked the Democratic Party and many of its supporters with his column in the New York Times advocating that Joe Biden should not run for re-election, based on Biden’s age and age-related inability to run a dynamic, effective campaign despite a good record of success in office. This bold and perilous opinion on Klein’s part was met with intense hostility and opposition from within the party apparatus, only to be eventually accepted and embraced by the party and the electorate after Biden’s disastrous debate performance.

In his latest book, Abundance, a collaboration with co-author Derek Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic and also a podcast host, Klein and Thompson build a conceptual framework for understanding why the Democratic Party and the left in general have lost the support of much of the population they have been trying so hard to help.

The principal problem they identify is the extent to which Democratic-led state and local governments have failed to provide the abundance they’ve promised, particularly in blue states like those on the West Coast. They provide a litany of examples of good promises unfulfilled, like the multi-decade high speed rail project in California, and the homelessness crisis and lack of affordable housing in major urban areas long governed by Democrats.

The primary reason they identify for this ongoing failure, despite the best of intentions, is the inability to build public infrastructure quickly and at a reasonable cost, such as  rapid mass transit, highways, more urban housing, clean energy projects and the like.

Klein and Thompson make the argument that Democrats and progressives should develop an exciting and positive vision of an abundant future, where our national wealth and high technology is used to build the kinds of cities, social amenities and clean environment people want to live in.

But the authors also suggest that Democratic leaders need to come to terms with the underlying reasons for their failures, such as NIMBYism, and the well-meaning over-regulation of public construction projects, which give the more affluent individuals and groups in communities the ability to endlessly delay and drive up the cost of projects they would rather not have in their own back yards.

In this argument, they are echoing an analysis I read recently in another new book, Why Nothing Works (2025) by Marc J. Dunkelman, which provides a longer-term historical account of how progressivism has always harbored two countervailing objectives that tend to create problems when out of balance. One of progressivism’s objectives has been to encourage strong government that can do good things for the people effectively, and prevent local obstructionism and corruption, but at the same time, it has also sought to protect the rights of individuals and communities against too-strong governments and corporations. These two objectives are in constant contention with each other within progressive thought.   

In Abundance, Klein and Thompson develop a similar argument, suggesting that Democrats over the past few decades have put in place so many administrative obstacles to getting things done, for the purpose of protecting the environment and the interests of their many minority and special interest constituencies, that the kind of grand achievements we used to be able to do as a society, like building the interstate highway system or sending men to the moon, can’t possibly be done rapidly or for an affordable price anymore.

The authors point out that the result is not only that fewer people vote for these Democratic governments and candidates, but in many places, people actually vote with their feet, moving to states where less liberal Republican administrations can provide cheaper housing, mass transit, highways and other desirable infrastructure and services because of the lesser constraints on governmental power and overreach.

If any of this (like the call for fewer regulations) sounds like an argument from the right, it isn’t. Klein and Thompson explicitly direct their arguments internally toward the left, in the hope of influencing liberals and progressives to see the value of diagnosing and fixing their own failures to build as a way of winning back votes and much of the popular support they have lost.

They also strongly contrast their abundance approach, the idea that creating social wealth and benefits creates a more just, fair and prosperous society, to the Trumpist “scarcity” style of politics, which constantly hammers away at the idea that there isn’t enough of anything, and whatever wealth there is, someone else is trying to take it away from you.

Abundance is not the last word on how Democrats and liberals need to reinvent the party, or fix all their problems. There is much here to debate, to consider and investigate further. But there is little doubt that Klein (with Thompson) has again written a groundbreaking, provocative book that is launching another movement or tendency on the left (“abundance” theory) that will become an important influence in liberal thought in the near future. Very highly recommended.

Book Review: The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power and Deception on the Eve of World War I (2023). Douglas Brunt.

During the past year, I've read a number of excellent books that seemed to resonate as part of the backstory to some of the most urgent issues of our time. I will be reviewing several of them over the next few weeks, but this book seemed to be an intriguing place to start exploring some of these missing threads from which our contemporary world has been woven.

Everyone has heard of Diesel engines, the rugged machines that power much of our transportation across the globe, from ships, to trains, to trucks, cars and airplanes, as well as giant electrical generators and many other industrial and military applications. But far fewer of us know the story of the invention of the Diesel engine, or what was so significant about it as opposed to the other internal combustion engine designs of the modern era. 

 

Despite having reached a stage in life where I know quite a bit about history, this fascinating story about a crucial modern technology was almost a complete surprise to me. It begins with an account of the formative years of the inventor, Rudolph Diesel, starting with his impoverished childhood in France, Germany and England in the late nineteenth century, during which he managed to obtain an excellent engineering education despite his family’s poverty,  because of his prodigious and obvious mechanical genius. 

 

The author also introduces us along the way to John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil, and traces Rockefeller’s drive to create monopolistic control over the miraculous new energy source of the twentieth century: oil. This profile was also very enlightening, in showing us how Rockefeller sought to steer new industrial and popular energy technologies inexorably toward those that used his petroleum products as fuel, even as other possible sources of energy were being discovered and tried at the same time.

For example, Rockefeller first pushed to replace whale oil for city lighting with kerosene, a refined oil product, only to have kerosene’s future in the lighting market rapidly eclipsed by Edison’s electric light bulbs and the creation of early electrical power grids. With the market for kerosene lighting collapsing almost as quickly as it had opened, Rockefeller then became determined to see that all powered means of transportation should use the newly-invented internal combustion engine, which required highly refined petroleum products like kerosene and gasoline to function.   

Diesel’s remarkable engine design came into being at the exact same time the internal combustion engine was being invented. What was different about Diesel’s engine, though, was that rather than relying on the inherently combustible and explosive nature of gasoline, his engine used mechanical pressure on the fuel to create the heat needed to make the fuel combust. 

 

This meant that a diesel engine could run on many different types of inert, safer and more stable fuels, as it still can today, including fuels that could be created without needing to have oil wells or refineries. It could run on many types of vegetable oils, for example, like the bio-diesel fuels of our era made from corn or used cooking oil. And once Diesel had the engine fully designed, and the problems worked out, these engines proved to be simple and utterly reliable.

 

Rudolph Diesel apparently was driven from an early age to develop this engine for two reasons: first, to massively improve the efficiency of an engine’s use of fuel, compared to the pitiful 2% efficiency of the coal-burning steam engines of the nineteenth century. Second, Diesel wanted to provide endless and accessible “clean” power for the betterment of mankind, in contrast to the smoky miasma produced by coal engines. He appears to have been very much an idealist in that sense.

 

Nevertheless, when his engine invention took off on the world stage, he became a very wealthy man, one of the richest and most important men of the age. His story of brilliant invention, and then growing wealthy and famous on the basis of his world-changing new technology, is familiar. It's very much like the stories of the tech titans of our own era. But as with some of the more well-meaning tech entrepreneurs of our age, at a certain point Diesel could not avoid politics, nor business and engineering competition, at a time when the world’s major power technologies of the twentieth century were being invented. 

 

Brunt then explores a number of the important cross-currents Diesel had to navigate throughout his career. Diesel had to compete with the invention and rapid development of the internal combustion engine, and its backing by Rockefeller, who was determined to prevent any power plant type becoming dominant in the world market that did not require his oil. 

 

Diesel also had to keep innovating and improving his engines, managing his licenses and patents in many countries, and solving problems created by foreign engineers as they tried to implement his designs. And eventually, he had to come to terms with the fact that political leaders in numerous countries – especially Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany – were intent on using his marvelous engine design to power war machines, like submarines  and battleships, uses of which he morally disapproved. 

 

This is all fascinating history in its own right, but there is an added twist Brunt unveils toward the end of the story. It turns out that Rudolph Diesel disappeared, at the height of his fame and fortune, just before World War I began, apparently by falling or jumping overboard off a channel ferry on a night trip from France to Britain.

 

You can imagine the public fascination and uproar a mysterious and improbable disappearance like that would set off today if it happened to one of our major tech celebrities, particularly if the stories in the news kept changing and becoming less believable as the days went by. But the mystery was never solved. Brunt does a nice job laying out the threads of the mystery, reviewing the various theories that came and went, and then coming up with a startling but very plausible answer of his own as to what really happened to Rudolph Diesel.

 

This is an excellent piece of historical writing about an essential figure in the development of the modern world, whose remarkable story, and fame and fortune, somehow vanished from popular memory with the passing of time, and with his own mysterious disappearance. He may be gone, and mostly forgotten, but his remarkable invention still powers much of our world, even if in the end most diesel engines are powered by one of the oil-based fuel products Rockefeller and his heirs owned and controlled, and not one of the other non-petroleum fuels Diesel preferred.

 

Reading this book gave me new perspectives on the history of the engine technologies and fuels that power our world, and how those decisions were first made. It also reconfirmed the extent to which Big Oil, since its inception just as today, has been hyper-focused on pushing our society and its technology choices in ways that favor their profits and their political and economic control above all other factors. I didn’t know this particular part of that backstory, and I’m glad I do now. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (2025). Chris Hayes.

I heard on the news last night that this brand new book by the popular MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes has zoomed to the #1 position on the New York Times bestseller list, only a couple of weeks after its release. Having now read it, and given the political trends of the past few years, and the chaos flowing out from the new administration since January 20^th, it’s not hard to understand why.

The topic of attention, and the adverse effects that our modern communications and social media technologies have on us as individuals, as well as on our political and social systems, has been much discussed and analyzed recently, in magazine articles, books and on TV. Given all that “attention on attention”, it might be tempting to assume Hayes’ book is just more noise on a by-now tired subject. But it is no such thing. Instead, it is a deeply thoughtful and well-researched volume, written in a clear, honest and accessible style, which is a pleasure to read.

 

Hayes makes clear from the outset that he is bringing two very different sets of eyes and perspectives to his analysis. On the one hand, he is one of us, a person of our time and place, who constantly uses and is frequently disturbed by his own use of social media on his smartphone, and the troubling effects it has on his own mind, his ability to focus and his relationships with family and friends.

 

On the other hand, in his professional role as a cable news host, his success is completely dependent on his ability to understand and use the tools of manipulating and commanding the attention of his viewers, to keep them watching, and his advertisers happy. So he is able to bring both his personal, subjective feelings and his informed, rational understanding of attention in our current media environment to explore many important aspects of attention, and to explain why and how the ability to control attention has become the most important currency of power and control in our society.

 

In the process of his wide-ranging exploration of this vital topic for understanding what is happening right now in our society, our lives and our politics, he writes beautifully and with real insight about many aspects of attention.

 

He begins with an explanation of the book’s title, which is a reference to the scene in the Odyssey, where Circe warns Odysseus to plug the ears of his ship’s crew, and tie himself to the mast, to avoid being lured to death by the Sirens. He continues to revisit that analogy throughout the book, which he uses to portray the constant conflict between our desire to be stimulated by interesting things in our environment, and our need to filter out and block distractions.

 

From there, he’s off on a fascinating trip through many aspects of attention. He talks about “moral panics”, and many of the past instances through history where new technologies were greeted first with delight and amazement, then with fear, because of their perceived harms to existing modes of attention, focus and memory. He compares and contrasts those “moral panics” to the present moment, and the phenomenon of social media on smartphones.

 

Hayes moves on to discuss the purpose of attention in the human and animal worlds, and the forms it takes, including voluntary (when one deliberately focuses), involuntary (when we respond to startling noises or threats in our environment) and social (the conscious and unconscious attention we pay to others, and what they are saying and doing). He does a nice job of surveying some of the earlier theories of psychology and philosophy relating to attention and our human lives, and the strengths, weaknesses and relevance of various ideas from the past.

 

One area I found particularly intriguing was his discussion of fame and celebrity, and how it affects and disrupts social attention for both the famous person, and the people observing and interacting with that famous person. It’s unusual to get such a perceptive, self-aware and relatively modest account of the subjective personal experience of celebrity from someone who is himself quite famous. I appreciated the fact that he recognizes the conflicting responses he and other famous people have to being “important” and instantly recognizable, and could reflect thoughtfully upon both the positive and negative aspects of it.  

 

Inevitably, his narrative leads him to draw conclusions about how social media and our current information and media markets have essentially turned our attention into a commodity, like labor in the Industrial Age, that has been expropriated from us by monopoly capitalism. He then turns to the problem of Donald Trump, and how his mastery of the ability to constantly bring attention back to himself, even if it’s negative attention, has led him to his current domination of the American political scene.

 

This is one of those books that is too sweeping to be fully summarized in a review. But it is well worth reading, both for the pleasure of following Hayes’ ideas and insights, and for the assistance it provides us in thinking about our own lives, and how we might begin to reassert control over the devices and social media apps that have so powerfully captured our own attention. Highly recommended.     

Book Review: The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI. Dr. Fei-Fei Li (2023).

This week, with all the sensational news of corporate upheaval and intrigue at OpenAI, the leading artificial intelligence (AI) company in the world, we’re all suddenly taking note of this strange new chapter in the history of human technological innovation. Indeed, ever since the release of ChatGPT last year, with its astounding capabilities to generate text and write software, it’s become an unavoidable new topic of conversation and thought, as we try to figure out what it portends for the future of work, society and even the human race itself.

 

It was in this context that I noticed and picked up a copy of The Worlds I See by Dr. Fei-Fei Li at my local library.  I’m so glad I did, because it’s a truly excellent book, combining a poignant personal account of the author’s life as a young Chinese immigrant girl, along with her parents, as they try to build a better life in America, with an insider’s look at how the quest for AI has developed over the past two decades inside our major universities and corporations.

 

If you dive into the details of AI and its history in the various news stories now appearing almost daily in the media, you will quickly find not only Dr. Li’s name and story, but also those of many of the other influential players with whom she has worked and who she names and describes in her book, who are now leading the industry and its ongoing research and development. 

 

Li’s most notable contribution to the field flowed from her decision as a young professor to try to build a huge database (called Image Net) holding digitized, labelled images of all the physical objects in our world. She succeeded, despite the seemingly overwhelming size of the project, and the discouragement of some older eminent scientists in the field, who saw it as both a hopeless and pointless undertaking. Her account of the process by which she led a small group of young scientists to overcome every obstacle in their way is a fascinating and inspiring story of scientists and engineers at work in our own era.

 

But her success in creating Image Net had unexpected consequences that accelerated the larger AI project. After sponsoring a contest to have other researchers use her database to train algorithms for computerized visual recognition of objects over several years, it suddenly turned out that neural networks – an AI architecture that had been tried in the past but had been in academic disfavor for several decades – proved to be massively more effective than more recent techniques, once it had been trained with a sufficiently large database.

 

From this major achievement, Dr. Li became one of the top experts in computer vision in the world. She was sought after as a scientist, researcher and teacher, and ended up moving from Princeton to Stanford, and then ultimately to a top position in AI at Google, where she found a very different culture than that of academia, with different priorities, and a far larger budget for her fast-growing research department.

    

At the same time she was leading this world-changing AI research, though, she was also living a human life we would all recognize. For example, her mother has suffered for many years with a chronic, life-threatening health condition, which led Dr. Li to think about new uses to which AI could and should be put in serving the needs of humanity.

 

As a result of her mother’s challenge to use her research to help others, she became involved in an effort to apply computer vision to problems of patient care in hospitals. But when she encountered unexpected resistance from those she thought she was helping (the nurses and medical staff), she was forced to begin considering more closely the negative side of the AI equation, and to think more deeply about the ethical and moral implications of her life’s work.

 

In the course of this life she recounts, she has also been a wife, a mother, a friend and mentor to many colleagues, and a loving daughter to both her parents, and she nicely weaves many of those important personal relationships and how they influenced her work into the larger story of her brilliant career.

 

So much of how we reached this technological moment, and what it portends for our futures, has taken place behind the closed doors of university laboratories and in corporate board rooms.  This outstanding and compassionate personal account by a leading scientist in AI explains how we got here, what it felt like to be one of the key contributors in such a dramatic process of human discovery and innovation, and also how both the perils and potential rewards of this technology have come into sharper focus at each step forward. Very highly recommended.