For many, technology offers hope for the future—that promise of shared human flourishing and liberation that always seems to elude our species. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies spark this hope in a particular way. They promise a future in which human limits and frailties are finally overcome—not by us, but by our machines.
Yet rather than open new futures, today's powerful AI technologies reproduce the past. Forged from oceans of our data into immensely powerful but flawed mirrors, they reflect the same errors, biases, and failures of wisdom that we strive to escape. Our new digital mirrors point backward. They show only where the data say that we have already been, never where we might venture together for the first time.
To meet today's grave challenges to our species and our planet, we will need something new from AI, and from ourselves.
Shannon Vallor makes a wide-ranging, prophetic, and philosophical case for what AI could be: a way to reclaim our human potential for moral and intellectual growth, rather than lose ourselves in mirrors of the past. Rejecting prophecies of doom, she encourages us to pursue technology that helps us recover our sense of the possible, and with it the confidence and courage to repair a broken world. Vallor calls us to rethink what AI is and can be, and what we want to be with it.
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
ISBN: 9780197759066
Number of pages: 272
Weight: 431 g
Dimensions: 201 x 135 x 28 mm
Vallor knocks it out of the park with her sharp observations, apt metaphor, and surprisingly powerful call to action. Written with wit and charm, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in AI and our collective future. - Kate Darling, MIT research scientist and author of The New Breed
The AI Mirror is the nuanced, introspective signal we need to cut through all the noise about artificial intelligence. Shannon Vallor is one of the most important voices we have to help us parse fantasy from reality when it comes to understanding the true threat that AI poses to humans: making us forget what it means to be human at all. This is one of the most important and poetic books we can read right now to find our way through the AI-hype headlines. - Safiya Umoja Noble, Author of Algorithms of Oppression
Shannon Vallor has written the book I've been waiting for. The AI Mirror delivers a powerful reframing of the future of humanity and artificial intelligence. Vallor offers a brilliant and original perspective on how AI can reflect our noblest values and aspirations, as well as our worst fears and flaws. She challenges us to rethink our relationship with AI, not as a threatening technology or a neutral set of new tools, but as a mirror that reveals who we are and aspire to be. AI Mirror is a captivating and insightful book that will inspire readers to think differently about the dangers and opportunities of AI. This is a must-read for anyone who cares about what happens to humanity as we push our long-standing relationship to technologies to new places. - Mary L. Gray, Co-author of Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass
With The AI Mirror, Shannon Vallor offers us a transformative approach for re-envisioning AI. Sophisticated yet accessible, the book explains how limitations of imagination around AI distort our visions of what the technology can and should do. But it doesn't have to be this way. Ultimately, The AI Mirror is a work of hope-hope for building a future that enables collective flourishing and provides opportunities for repair and reclamation of our sociotechnical world. - Karen Levy, Author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance
STARRED REVIEW: [A] mind-bending treatise...[and] a fresh and fascinating take on the perils and promises of a much-debated technology. - Publishers Weekly
[A] clarifying new book...The AI Mirror stands out for its witty, crystal-clear exposition of the real threat from AI. - Becky Hogge, Financial Times
Vallor's style is readable and engaging... It's far from comfortable reading, but voices like Vallor's feel like a necessary counter-balance to the mystifying, self-aggrandising rhetoric of tech titans. - Roisin Kiberd, Irish Independent
We would do well to listen to experts like Vallor... to discover how [AI] really works, rather than succumb to fantastical visions of the future. - Alex Wilkins, New Scientist
Best summer books of 2024: Technology: "There has been a deluge of books on AI this year. The AI Mirror... is among the most thought-provoking." - John Thornhill, Financial Times
thought-provoking. - Brian Clegg, Popular Science
An interesting and thought-provoking book. - Ove Christensen, Kulturkapellet
A critical read for AI leaders and ethicists, entrepreneurs and investors, journalists and concerned coders. - Alice Horrigan, New York Journal of Books
Vallor explores our relationship with AI, carefully unpacking her mirror metaphor. She claims that we are dangerously captivated - and also misled - by the image of ourselves that is reflected back by AI machinery. Remember Narcissus, she warns us. - Sarah Richmond, LSE Review of Books
A work of human art and reads like poetry in places. - Richard Lofthouse, QUAD
[A] wise and humane book. - Ed Smith, New Statesman
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