Category: Books

Philosopher Argued Artificial Intelligence Would Never Reach Human Intelligence

(p. A28) Professor Dreyfus became interested in artificial intelligence in the late 1950s, when he began teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He often brushed shoulders with scientists trying to turn computers into reasoning machines.
. . .
Inevitably, he said, artificial intelligence ran up against something called the common-knowledge problem: the vast repository of facts and information that ordinary people possess as though by inheritance, and can draw on to make inferences and navigate their way through the world.
“Current claims and hopes for progress in models for making computers intelligent are like the belief that someone climbing a tree is making progress toward reaching the moon,” he wrote in “Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer” (1985), a book he collaborated on with his younger brother Stuart, a professor of industrial engineering at Berkeley.
His criticisms were greeted with intense hostility in the world of artificial intelligence researchers, who remained confident that success lay within reach as computers grew more powerful.
When that did not happen, Professor Dreyfus found himself vindicated, doubly so when research in the field began incorporating his arguments, expanded upon in a second edition of “What Computers Can’t Do” in 1979 and “What Computers Still Can’t Do” in 1992.
. . .
For his 2006 book “Philosophy: The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions,” Nicholas Fearn broached the topic of artificial intelligence in an interview with Professor Dreyfus, who told him: “I don’t think about computers anymore. I figure I won and it’s over: They’ve given up.”

For the full obituary, see:
WILLIAM GRIMES. “Hubert L. Dreyfus, Who Put Computing In Its Place, Dies at 87.” The New York Times (Wednesday, May 3, 2017): A28.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date MAY 2, 2017, and has the title “Hubert L. Dreyfus, Philosopher of the Limits of Computers, Dies at 87.”)

Dreyfus’s last book on the limits of artificial intelligence, was:
Dreyfus, Hubert L. What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992.

Mark Twain’s “Desperately Striving Entrepreneurship”

(p. A13) For a novelist with such a tart view of human character, Twain’s gullibility is hard to fathom. No matter his dismal track record, he always appraised the next opportunity as a sure thing. The two fields he knew about, books and newspapers, caused him more grief than any other. He had success with Charles L. Webster & Co., the publisher he founded, which issued the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. But after that runaway hit, he published a string of lemons.
Even worse was his decade-long investment in a typesetting machine, the Paige Compositor, which, Twain noted, would be faster than a human typesetter and “does not get drunk” and “does not join the Printer’s Union.” But its inventor proved to be a hopeless perfectionist, his machine with its thousands of parts a tribute to complexity gone mad. Ultimately, Twain invested $175,000–an immense sum. With the mogul Rogers guiding him, the author transferred his assets to his wife and put his publishing company into bankruptcy. Only by embarking on a world-wide speaking tour was he able to pay his debts.
Mr. Crawford doesn’t seem curious about whether Twain’s financial capers informed his writing. He has nothing notable to say, for instance, on “The Prince and the Pauper,” a wry commentary on the sort of class envy to which Twain himself was susceptible. Nor does Mr. Crawford attempt to reconcile the conventional view of Twain as a folksy raconteur with the evidence of his desperately striving entrepreneurship.

For the full review, see:
Roger Lowenstein. “BOOKSHELF; A Pudding Head and His Money; Given the novelist’s tart view of human character, the financial misadventures of Mark Twain are hard to fathom.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, October 27, 2017): A13.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Oct. 26, 2017, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Review: A Pudding Head and His Money; Given the novelist’s tart view of human character, the financial misadventures of Mark Twain are hard to fathom.”)

The book under review, is:
Crawford, Alan Pell. How Not to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Brain as Computer “Is a Bad Metaphor”

(p. A13) In “The Biological Mind: How Brain, Body, and Environment Collaborate to Make Us Who We Are,” Mr. Jasanoff, the director of the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering, presents a lucid primer on current brain science that takes the form of a passionate warning about its limitations. He argues that the age of popular neurohype has persuaded many of us to identify completely with our brains and to misunderstand the true nature of these marvelous organs.
We hear constantly, for example, that the brain is a computer. This is a bad metaphor, Mr. Jasanoff insists. Computers run on electricity, so we concentrate on the electrical activity within the brain; yet there is also chemical and hormonal signaling, for which there are no good computing analogies.

For the full review, see:
Steven Poole. “”BOOKSHELF; Identify Your Self.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, April 6, 2018): A13.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 5, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘The Biological Mind’ Review: Identify Your Self.”)

The book under review, is:
Jasanoff, Alan. The Biological Mind: How Brain, Body, and Environment Collaborate to Make Us Who We Are. New York: Basic Books, 2018.

“Science Didn’t Lie”

(p. 22) In the words of The Saturday Evening Post: “If America doesn’t keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southern and Eastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in turn.”
According to Thomas C. Leonard, who teaches at Princeton, the driving force behind this and other such laws came from progressives in the halls of academia — people who combined “extravagant faith in science and the state with an outsized confidence in their own expertise.” “Illiberal Reformers” is the perfect title for this slim but vital account of the perils of intellectual arrogance in dealing with explosive social issues. Put simply, Leonard says, elite progressives gave respectable cover to the worst prejudices of the era — not to rabble-rouse, but because they believed them to be true. Science didn’t lie.
But barring undesirables was only half the battle; the herd also had to be culled from within. In 1907, Indiana became the first state to legalize forced sterilization, starting a landslide endorsed by progressive icons like Theodore Roosevelt and the birth control champion Margaret Sanger.

For the full review, see:
DAVID OSHINSKY. “No Justice for the Weak.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, March 20, 2018): 1 & 22-23.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 14, 2018, and has the title “‘Imbeciles’ and ‘Illiberal Reformers’.”)

The book under review, is:
Leonard, Thomas C. Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

The Role of Progressives in the Forced Sterilization of Thousands

(p. 22) Progressivism was always more than a single cause, however. Attracting reformers of all stripes, it aimed to fix the ills of society through increased government action — the “administrative state.” Progressives pushed measures ranging from immigration restriction to eugenics in a grotesque attempt to protect the nation’s gene pool by keeping the “lesser classes” from reproducing. If one part of progressivism emphasized fairness and compassion, the other reeked of bigotry and coercion.
“Imbeciles,” by Adam Cohen, the author of “Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America,” examines one of the darkest chapters of progressive reform: the case of Buck v. Bell. It’s the story of an assault upon thousands of defenseless people seen through the lens of a young woman, Carrie Buck, locked away in a Virginia state asylum. In meticulously tracing her ordeal, Cohen provides a superb history of eugenics in America, from its beginnings as an offshoot of social Darwinism — ­human survival of the fittest — to its rise as a popular movement, advocating the state-sponsored sterilization of “feeble­minded, insane, epileptic, inebriate, criminalistic and other degenerate persons.”

For the full review, see:
DAVID OSHINSKY. “No Justice for the Weak.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, March 20, 2018): 1 & 22-23.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 14, 2018, and has the title “‘Imbeciles’ and ‘Illiberal Reformers’.”)

The book under review, is:
Cohen, Adam. Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck. New York: Penguin Press, 2016.

“Searing Portrait” of Uber Entrepreneur Travis Kalanick

(p. B3) Mr. Lashinsky’s book gives readers an inside view of the ride-hailing giant’s creation and what created the broken corporate culture that yielded so many negative news stories this year.
“Wild Ride” offers a searing portrait of Uber’s former chief executive, Travis Kalanick, whom Mr. Lashinsky shows to be both a genius and wildly headstrong (and not in a good way). Because of when it was published, the book does not include many of the episodes that consumed Uber in 2017, including Susan Fowler’s viral blog post about the company’s misogynistic culture and the ouster of Mr. Kalanick. But until that book is written — and it surely will be — “Wild Ride” is a good primer.

For the full commentary, see:
Sorkin, Andrew Ross. “DEALBOOK For a Year Filled With News, A List of Books Worth a Look.” The New York Times (Tuesday, DEC. 26, 2017): B1 & B3.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date DEC. 25, 2017, and has the title “DEALBOOK; In a Year of Nonstop News, a Batch of Business Books Worth Reading.”)

The Lashinsky book mentioned above, is:
Lashinsky, Adam. Wild Ride: Inside Uber’s Quest for World Domination. New York: Portfolio, 2017.

Case Study of Effects of Closing a Factory

(p. B1) Perhaps the most illuminating business book of the year, for me, is Amy Goldstein’s “Janesville: An American Story.” If you really want to understand what’s going on in today’s real economy — beyond the headlines about new stock-market highs, tax policy or the latest list of billionaires — spend some time with this true tale of what happened in the middle-class town of Janesville, Wis., after General Motors closed a factory there.
Ms. Goldstein admirably shows all sides of this story, capturing in microcosm all of the issues that so many communities across the United States are facing. You will probably be left doing some hard thinking about what is driving the politics of the moment, although Ms. Goldstein brilliantly, and respectfully, paints the book’s characters with such nuance that readers from across the ideological spectrum are likely to arrive at different conclusions about heroes and villains.
In crafting this deeply reported and riveting read, Ms. Goldstein spent considerable time in Janesville. As a result, you get a palpable sense of what life is like there; of the financial and psychological impact that a major plant closing has; and of the knock-on effects such an event has on other businesses and institutions. She paints vivid portraits of characters who include laid-off workers seeking retraining, union officials and local politicians, Speaker Paul D. Ryan among them. If you liked “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” J. D. Vance’s best-seller about growing up in Ohio and the decline of the industrial Midwest, I think you’ll find that “Janesville” makes these issues real in a new and compelling way.

For the full commentary, see:
Sorkin, Andrew Ross. “DEALBOOK For a Year Filled With News, A List of Books Worth a Look.” The New York Times (Tuesday, DEC. 26, 2017): B1 & B3.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date DEC. 25, 2017, and has the title “DEALBOOK; In a Year of Nonstop News, a Batch of Business Books Worth Reading.”)

The Goldstein book mentioned above, is:
Goldstein, Amy. Janesville: An American Story. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Mackenzie Was Wrong in Thinking He Was a Failure, but Was Right About the Northwest Passage

(p. 10) In the summer of 1789, a young fur trader named Alexander Mackenzie led an expedition in search of a Northwest Passage. He and his voyageurs and Chipewyan guides were attempting, 14 years before Lewis and Clark, to cross North America, paddling birch bark canoes down a river they hoped would pierce the Rocky Mountains. Mackenzie was a businessman who wanted to speed the pace of trade by connecting New York and China via an interior passage through the continent. He did find such a route, without knowing it. Mackenzie died thinking he was a failure, when he was really just 200 years early.
Some ideas are fantastically ahead of their time. In 1636, René Descartes created contact lenses, using glass tubes filled with water; unfortunately, the wearer was unable to blink. Charles Babbage invented digital “difference engines” — essentially modern programmable computers but powered by steam — in the 1820s. And Kodak developed digital cameras in 1974 but discarded the product idea because it thought no one wanted to look at photos on televisions.
In a particularly ill-timed episode, Giovanni Caselli invented the fax machine in 1856. Letter writers could scribble a message onto electrically charged foil, and the portions covered by ink would block the flow of current. The stylus of Caselli’s device then scanned each line of text, transmitting the signal via telegraph lines to a second machine, which would scrawl out a “fac simile” of the letter.
To be practical, the system required a coordinated investment throughout a region, and Napoleon III had plans to modernize all of France with Caselli’s pantelegraph, more than a decade before Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. But before it could be installed, Napoleon III lost the Franco-Prussian War, his government fell, and Paris descended into the brutal anarchy of the Commune. Caselli faded into obscurity, and his technology was forgotten for a century.
Like the fax machine and computer, Alexander Mackenzie’s Northwest Passage was too forward-looking to be practical or useful. Today the melting Northwest Passage — along the North Slope of Alaska, through the maze of Canadian Arctic islands, then back down along Greenland’s west coast, to the Atlantic — is regularly in the news. A holy grail for generations of explorers is now finally open, because of climate change. Giant cargo and oil tankers regularly ply those seas, and even the Crystal Serenity cruise ship, with 1,700 people onboard (many in black tie), has made the journey the past two summers.
. . .
Ideas do not exist only on their own merits. Timing matters.

For the full commentary, see:
Brian Castner. “The Northwest Passage That Might Have Been.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sunday, March 11, 2018): 10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 10, 2018.)

Castner’s commentary is related to his book:
Castner, Brian. Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage. New York: Doubleday, 2018.

Chinese Economy “on the Brink of a Precipitous Downturn?”

(p. A15) Reporters in China often run up against Potemkin projects–gleaming science parks sitting half empty, new districts with eerily few residents, solar-powered cities where most of the panels are disconnected. These wasteful investments, designed to fulfill local-government ambitions to boost construction and drive short-term growth, can be a nuisance when researching stories about innovation or environmental foresight. But what if such projects are not a distraction but the story itself? What if China’s economy is, in fact, on the brink of a precipitous downturn? That is the question Dinny McMahon asks in “China’s Great Wall of Debt.”
Mr. McMahon, a former Beijing-based correspondent for this newspaper, suggests that China has powered ahead for as long as it has not because it is immune to crises but because its government has so far managed to intervene to stave them off. When China’s stock market plunged in 2015, the central government directed fund managers to buy instead of sell and pressured journalists to write only optimistic reports. One reporter who strayed from the official line was trotted out on state television to apologize.
Such intervention has created a false sense of confidence, Mr. McMahon argues, which in turn has led to a bad case of economic bloating.

For the full review, see:
Mara Hvistendahl. “”BOOKSHELF; The Chinese Growth Charade; Ghost cities, shadow banks, white-elephant state projects: The country’s pursuit of growth at all costs may come at a high price.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, March 14, 2018): A15.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 13, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘China’s Great Wall of Debt’ Review: The Chinese Growth Charade; Ghost cities, shadow banks, white-elephant state projects: The country’s pursuit of growth at all costs may come at a high price.”)

The book under review, is:
McMahon, Dinny. China’s Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans and the End of the Chinese Miracle. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.

Early Industrial Workers’ Living Standards Improved Over Their Lifetimes

(p. C6) Historians have long debated whether the Industrial Revolution was a net benefit to those who labored in the mills. The first generation of workers generally enjoyed higher wages and liberation from the confines of rural life. Yes, there was child labor, but one girl who entered a New England mill at age 11 recalled: “It was paradise here because you got your money, and you did whatever you wanted to with it.” In her book “Liberty’s Dawn” (2013), Emma Griffin studied those early industrial workers longitudinally and found that their living standards improved markedly over a lifetime.
. . .
William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” are now brightly lit in China, but are they still infernal? Today, Mr. Freeman reports, Foxconn offers “a library, bookstores, a variety of cafeterias and restaurants, supermarkets, . . . swimming pools, basketball courts, soccer fields, and a stadium, a movie theater, electronic game rooms, cybercafés, a wedding-dress shop, banks, ATMs, two hospitals, a fire station, a post office, and huge LED screens that show announcements and cartoons.” But Chinese worker dormitories impose a positively Victorian regime of moral supervision: no drinking, gambling or visiting the opposite sex. Work rules are draconian. And surveillance cameras are everywhere (though, come to think of it, we have plenty of those in the West).
Ultimately, Mr. Freeman can’t decide whether industrialism represents progress or dystopia, and that ambivalence reflects his clear eyes and fair-mindedness. He often lets workers speak for themselves, and they don’t always agree. Xu Lizhi, one of those Foxconn employees who killed himself, was also a poet: “They’ve trained me to become docile / Don’t know how to shout or rebel / How to complain or denounce / Only how to silently suffer exhaustion.” But another worker from a small Hunan village was amazed by his company dormitory: “I had never lived in a multi-story building, so it felt exciting to climb stairs and be upstairs.” Mr. Freeman reminds us that, benevolent or tyrannical, the factory was an exponential leap in the human experience.

For the full review, see:
Rose, Jonathan. “The Very Symbol of Modern Times; Workers’ paradise or soul-deadening dystopia? Why society remains of two minds about the factory.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Feb. 24, 2018): C6.
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs, added; ellipsis within paragraph, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 23, 2018, and has the title “Review: The Very Symbol of Modern Times; Workers’ paradise or soul-deadening dystopia? Why society remains of two minds about the factory.”)

The book under review, is:
Freeman, Joshua B. Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

The book by Emma Griffin, mentioned above, is:
Griffin, Emma. Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.

Upward Mobility from Moving to the Robust Redundant Labor Markets of Open Boomtowns

(p. B3) Chicago in 1850 was a muddy frontier town of barely 30,000 people. Within two decades, it was 10 times that size. Within another two decades, that number had tripled. By 1910, Chicago — hog butcher for the world, headquarters of Montgomery Ward, the nerve center of the nation’s rail network — had more than two million residents.
“You see these numbers, and they just look fake,” said David Schleicher, a law professor at Yale who writes on urban development and land use. Chicago heading into the 20th century was the fastest-growing city America has ever seen. It was a classic metropolitan magnet, attracting anyone in need of a job or a raise.
But while other cities have played this role through history — enabling people who were geographically mobile to become economically mobile, too — migration patterns like the one that fed Chicago have broken down in today’s America. Interstate mobility nationwide has slowed over the last 30 years. But, more specifically and of greater concern, migration has stalled in the very places with the most opportunity.
As Mr. Schleicher puts it, local economic booms no longer create boomtowns in America.
. . .
Some people aren’t moving into wealthy regions because they’re stuck in struggling ones. They have houses they can’t sell or government benefits they don’t want to lose. But the larger problem is that they’re blocked from moving to prosperous places by the shortage and cost of housing there. And that’s a deliberate decision these wealthy regions have made in opposing more housing construction, a prerequisite to make room for more people.
Compare that with most of American history. The country’s economic growth has long “gone hand in hand with enormous reallocation of population,” write the economists Kyle Herkenhoff, Lee Ohanian and Edward Prescott in a recent study of what’s hobbling similar population flows now.
. . .
Were it not for all the restrictions on housing in the most productive places — if workers were able to more freely migrate to them — Mr. Herkenhoff and his co-authors and the economists Enrico Moretti and Chang-Tai Hsieh have estimated that the nation’s G.D.P. would be substantially higher. By their calculations, there are millions of workers missing from the Bay Area and metropolitan New York today.
The population growth that is occurring in these metro areas is fueled almost entirely by immigration, as Ryan Avent points out in “The Gated City,” where he makes a similar argument to Mr. Schleicher. If we consider only domestic moves, about 900,000 more people have moved away from New York than to it since 2010. On net, about 47,000 have left both San Jose and Washington, D.C., while Boston has lost a net 36,000.

For the full commentary, see:
Emily Badger. “Why New York and the Bay Area Are Missing Millions of Workers.” The New York Times (Friday, Dec. 8, 2017): B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 6, 2017, and has the title “What Happened to the American Boomtown?”)

The Herkenhoff et al. paper mentioned above, is:
Herkenhoff, Kyle F., Lee E. Ohanian, and Edward C. Prescott. “Tarnishing the Golden and Empire States: Land-Use Restrictions and the U.S. Economic Slowdown.” Journal of Monetary Economics 93 (Jan. 2018): 89-109.

The Moretti and Hsieh paper mentioned above, is:
Hsieh, Chang-Tai, and Enrico Moretti. “Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation.” Working paper, May 18, 2017.

The book by Ryan Avent, mentioned above, is:
Avent, Ryan. The Gated City. Amazon Digital Services LLC, 2011.