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.

Personal Note: Some News, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Hello, friends!

Most of you by now probably already know this, but for those readers who haven't been closely following my musical adventures, I did (as promised) release my debut music album Strangers back on September 29th. It has 12 of my original songs on it, including my first seven singles from 2021 and 2022, and five new songs which were previously unreleased, all from 2023.  

I'm very pleased with how it turned out, and it has been so much fun sharing it with the world, and hearing peoples' reactions to the songs and the album. I also released new lyric videos for the five new songs, so you can listen to the entire album on YouTube, with videos, if you prefer that to just listening on your favorite music streaming service.

If you're curious about it, please click either the link to my music website, and/or the link to my music YouTube channel, on the lower right side of the page. 

And if you want to stay in touch with what I'm doing creatively by receiving occasional emails (about either this blog, and/or my music), please go straight to my music web site's Contact page, and add your name and email to my email list!  I haven't actually sent any emails out yet, but I plan to shortly, and then only every so often (and you can quit any time). So please join!

 

By the way -- I expect to begin writing more about the topic of artificial intelligence (AI), as you'll see by my next post later today. But the arrival of ChatGPT last year actually poses immediate questions that relate to this blog, and what I'm doing in continuing to write it (or why). 

If I wanted to, I could now ask ChatGPT to write my blog posts for me, once I've found a book, or a show, or any topic I want to share with you, so why should I even bother to do it myself?  And it's a very reasonable question, one that every writer and creative person is now having to ask. But that won't be happening here any time soon.

ChatGPT can accurately describe and summarize any work of art or source of information we ask it about, at whatever intellectual level and in whatever writing style we might choose. That is an amazingly powerful tool, which like millions of other people, I look forward to exploring and using more in the years ahead.

But my blog is written to tell you what I think about something, to use my own words, and to describe it based on what I found interesting and important, not on a condensation of what a lot of other anonymous writers said. So at least until I say otherwise, please be assured that the content on this blog is 100% human-generated.

 

One more very gratifying bit of news I wanted to share is that when I logged on this morning, I noticed that my "page views" count for The Memory Cache blog has just passed 10,000 (since I started this blog in February 2022). 

It's not a huge number, but it's very pleasing to me, since it means that there are still readers out there who are interested in what I have to say, even after my 6-month absence this year while I was working on the album. So I will keep writing and posting more reviews, and my own thoughts about the very best of what I read, watch and notice. Thank you so much for visiting!

In fact, in that vein, it's Thanksgiving tomorrow, my favorite holiday of the year. So I'm wishing you, your family and friends a very happy Thanksgiving, and giving thanks myself for my own family, friends, readers, music followers and community in this always-interesting time and place we share. Stay well, and have a wonderful holiday season!      

Book Review: The Every (Dave Eggers, 2021).

A while ago, I wrote a review of Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle from 2015, which was made into a good film with Emma Watson in the starring role. The Circle told the story of a naïve young woman who goes to work for a huge, powerful California tech company (called The Circle), that combines an insular campus full of idealistic young employees, a charismatic male founder with cult-leader magnetism, and the sort of messianic “save the world through better tech and openness” approach to business that is by now all too familiar.

I’ve recently become a real fan of Dave Eggers, as I’ve read more of his books and come to appreciate what a fine and prolific writer he is. He is one of the few popular authors I know of who routinely produces outstanding, smart best-sellers in both fiction and non-fiction categories, and I’ve now enjoyed and appreciated several of his books from each genre.

 

But in The Every, Eggers’s sequel to The Circle, he has outdone himself, with a just-barely fictionalized account of a recognizable, chaotic, fast-evolving version of our society that will make you laugh at its absurdity, at the same time it will terrify you with how closely it appears to mirror our own world, and the dangerous directions in which we seem to be heading.

 

In The Every, The Circle has grown by mergers and acquisitions into a new mega-corporation (The Every) that now dominates almost every sphere of global business, and increasingly politics, communications, healthcare and the environment, through its tight control of supply chains and its massive financial power. But the real source of its power is data, obtained through the steady erosion of personal privacy protections, which are collapsing under a relentless onslaught of popular new smartphone applications, sold by The Every to an eager population under the guise of personal empowerment and self-improvement.

 

As in The Circle, the main protagonist is an intelligent and sympathetic young woman. But there the similarities end, because in The Circle, our hero (or anti-hero) Mae Holland took the frustrations and setbacks she encountered in her job as the fuel that led her to challenge the company’s leadership to a dangerous game of corporate politics, and through a series of smart moves and timely revelations to ultimately triumph over them.

 

In the nearly omnipotent and all-knowing environment of The Every, though, our hero is Delaney, on a secret private mission to work her way into the company, to find the one lever that will allow her to destroy it in the hope of saving human privacy and freedom. With the help of a hacker friend, she manages to get hired, then slowly evolves a plan to use her social engineering skills to propose new applications so horrific in their privacy implications that she dreams they will create a public revolt that must lead to the company’s demise.

 

There’s only one problem with her plan. Each time she helps create another terrible new privacy-violating app, it becomes wildly popular, leading to even less freedom and privacy for everyone, and turns into another huge triumph for The Every instead. Can Delaney find a way out of her increasingly hopeless situation? And how long can she keep up her quixotic campaign to save the world, before she’s discovered and fired or worse?

 

This is an inspired dystopian novel, and a black comedy as well. It’s funny in the sense that every time another setback occurs, as Delaney’s subversive plans produce the exact opposite result that we would expect and hope for (in terms of peoples’ presumed desire for freedom and dignity), you have to laugh. And admit to yourself that although it’s another very depressing plot twist, it also seems perfectly realistic – exactly what you believe would probably happen in our own society, as well as the world of the novel.

 

It’s brilliant too in its portrayals of the behavior of people at work in a modern tech company, as they deal with the internal contradictions between their desire to please management, to gain status relative to their peers, to conform to get ahead, and to handle qualms about doing something seemingly immoral or repugnant when it also pays their salaries.

  

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World asked essentially the same questions about what we humans want (as between technology and freedom) almost a century ago, but most of the science and technology he envisioned in his story didn’t exist yet.  It does in the world of The Every. There’s hardly any advanced technology, or corporate, political and social behavior modification in this book that isn’t already here, or utterly believable based on current trends.

 

Read it and dread (or maybe not, depending on where you are on the “convenience versus privacy” spectrum).  Highly recommended.