Ep. 65: 5 Books to Understand AI

Number one, and this is really If you're going to pick just one or you want to recommend it to somebody else, I think this is a great one to start with.

And the book is The Means of Prediction, How AI Really Works and Who Benefits by Maximilian Casey.

Now, you can see this is not a huge book.

It's short.

It's easy to read.

But at the same time, it really covers a lot of ground and explains a lot of things that You're not going to get just sort of reading news articles here and there.

It explains how AI works, different types of AI, which, you know, if you're just following kind of chat GPT and large language models and all that sort of thing, you may not realize that there are various different types of AIs, not just one.

So this book does a great job of going through that, describing how they work.

At a high level, you don't need an engineering background.

You'll be able to understand this, I assure you.

It also focuses sort of on the idea of technological determinism and countering that, that technology is shaped by the owners and the designers.

It's not something neutral that just evolves and follows a natural path that is inevitable.

The book also goes into societal impact, the choices that we have, how there are different resources and choices about how we allocate those resources.

It also offers some thoughts on regulation.

Now, regulation is, of course, government policy, laws, things like that, which are important.

But also, it falls in the domain of responsible AI.

So even within an individual workplace, you're often regulating how AI is used in your business or in your organization.

And these principles and policies apply to both areas within the professional business or organizational world and in policy itself.

So you got a lot in a small package.

So this is a great place to start.

Very accessible, covers a lot.