Metadata#
- Author(s): Franklin Foer
- Number of pages: 272
- Year published: 2017
- Year read: 2018
Review#
DNF @ ~30%. More like: threw across room at 30%, after great restraint.
This was tedious, tiresome and totally lame. It’s basically a Great Men history of the tech industry, narrow-minded and completely ignorant of a bunch of contexts (social, economic, historical). The Great Men that I got through were: the Whole Earth Catalog’s Stewart Brand, Alan Turing, Ray Kurzweil, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg - and I stopped there. There are also some detours into Great Men of History like Descartes and Leibniz. There is a Great Man of Reporting Tech (which I have particular beef about - the best tech reporter these days is Kara Swisher!).
In between these hagiographies - the only concrete-ish parts of the book - Foer uses vague, hyperbolic language to talk about “algorithms” and “AI” and “monopolies” in a way that feels superficial and like, well, he doesn’t have a background in tech or economics. Example: he attributes the tech giants’ accumulation of monopolistic power as being guided by their “theocratic”, near-spiritual belief in their own, uh, futury-ness (as prescribed by the Whole Earth Catalog). I guess he’s never heard of economies of scale? Or natural monopolies? I’m not saying Google is a natural monopoly, but he kept… NOT acknowledging this basic idea of econ that I begun to wonder, “Wait… maybe he doesn’t know about it.”
In other things he doesn’t know about: algorithms! According to Foer, they were invented by Leibniz (?!). They’re also, apparently, mystical and indecipherable and certainly not just patterns of deterministic steps following logic (not invented by Leibniz), fed into a machine (also not invented by Leibniz). According to Foer, Turing - as he lay in a field after a good run - had the “visionary genius” vision of putting algorithms into machines. Not… Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, you know, uh, 100 years before. I mean, this is mind boggling. There’s even a bit where Foer recasts Mario Savio’s “throw yourself onto the gears of the machine” speech as a reaction against the oncoming onslaught of computers’, uh, computeriness.
Descriptions of AI - or, I should say, “AI” - were similarly obfuscated, convoluted, and vague. It seems like whenever Foer didn’t know how to explain a technical concept (which was every time he raised a technical concept!), he would just say “ALGORITHMS” and cue some dramatic music. He conflated neural networks with AI based on cognitive models. He didn’t mention, er, HOW algorithms may be problematic.
ALLLLL THIS would have been vaguely more tolerable if the tone of the book hadn’t been so damn ego-heavy and high-falutin’. If he hadn’t used so many $1 words and philosophical ramblings instead of, well, research evidence and data (of which there is ample to support many of his arguments!).
Awful. I’d recommend Jaron Lanier or Cathy O’Neil or Sherry Turkle instead.