Smith, Brian Cantwell (2019). The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment. The MIT Press, Cambridge,
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BOOK REVIEW
Smith, Brian Cantwell (2019). The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. ISBN 9780262043045 Karamjit S. Gill1
© Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
In “The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment”, Brian Cantwell Smith, asks the reader to ponder over such foundational questions as: What is intelligence? What are its physical limits? What lies beyond the line of possibility, so that we can give up longing for it? In unpacking the notion of intelligence itself, the book raises the question of what AI has accomplished so far, what can be expected in the foreseeable future, and what sorts of tasks can responsibly be assigned to systems currently constructed or imagined? In response to these questions, the author provides an over the horizon argument and exploration of ‘Reckoning and Judgment’ that should be of interest to those who are attuned to, engaged in, and curious about the pursuit of the nature of intelligence, artificial intelligence, cognition, machine learning, deep learning and data science. It may be tempting to be in awe of the unimagined computational power of deep learning and big data systems of the new “AI spring”. However, these AI systems also generate a deep concern about not what captures our imagination but their consequences—the alien AIs taking over our jobs, our lives, our world. We wonder whether we should take comfort in the fact that the universe is a web of purely local influence posing a formidable challenge to any system or creature aiming to comprehend its world. Does this means that no system, human or machine, can determine what is going on merely by “looking out” and seeing or sampling it? In exploring these questions, Smith introduces the reader to the term ‘reckoning’ for the types of calculative prowess at which computer and AI systems already excel—skills of extraordinary utility and importance, on which there is every reason to suppose computers will continue to advance (ultimately far surpassing us in many cases, where they do * Karamjit S. Gill [email protected] 1
not do so already), but skills embodied in devices that lack the ethical commitment, deep contextual awareness, and ontological sensitivity of judgment. The term “judgment” is about knowing the difference between appearance and reality, that is existentially committed to its own existence and to the integrity of the world as world, that is beholden to objects and bound by them. For clarity, we meet an example of why we entrust a child in the care of an adult, and what can be catastrophically wrong with the response “But I did everything you said!”? In this notion of trust, the author says that we want sitters to take care of our children, not of their (or our) registrations of our children. We want them to deal with any circumstances that arise, not just with those circumstances we have registered in advance. To reach out to the world in this way requires judgment, requires being an adu
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