Smart Until It's Dumb

An excellent book on the current state of AI by someone who has worked in both academia and corporations as a data scientist. His experience enables him to show how AI systems work in the real world and why so much of the hype and fear about AI is misplaced.

If all you know about AI is what you see in the headlines, you'll be enlightened. If because of experience you are skeptical of these claims, you'll understand why your opinion is justified.

Book Review

Title: Smart Until It’s Dumb by Emmanuel Maggiori

Genre: Non-Fiction, Science, Technology

Rating: 4.5 Stars

The introduction sets out what Maggiori intends to do with the book, which is two main things, how current AI works, what it can and can’t do and a real look inside the businesses and industries that are using and developing AI technology. The first chapter looks into the machine learning era, Maggiori first breaks down the various AI booms that have happened first in the 60s and then in the 80s before bringing us to the most recent boom in the 2010s. the first two AI booms led to so-called AI Winters because of the lack of resources and the technology available to the time but that changed in the early 2010s since technology had advanced alongside our understanding of technology. Maggiori then breaks down what machine learning is with its pros and cons and its limitations. It was interesting to learn that despite being able to carry out actions by itself AI needs to be assisted with its datasets otherwise it will be unable to perform its primary task which means for things like self-driving cars they might actually be damn near impossible since the technology would always need to be supervised unless these barriers can be overcome.

In chapter 2, Maggiori begins looking into deep learning and its dangers. Deep learning takes aspects of machine learning and develops on them and we use it for many things including image and video analysis and natural language processing. Maggiori goes into depth about what deep learning is and how it differs and builds on machine learning which is a little complex to follow even in layman’s terms if you aren’t familiar with technology and the way it works but once you get the hang of it things make sense. This is the foundation of the book as it understand the potential and potential dangers and limitations of AI you need to understand how it works and functions of a fundamental level.

In chapter 3, Maggiori begins to look at how smart AI actually is. AI is both incredibly smart and stupid at the same time and when you break it down the distinction between smart and stupid is a lot clearer in terms of AI. For things like number plate recognition AI only needs instruction on the identification of letter and number where as for language translation there are more areas for mistakes. Maggiori uses two brilliant examples here, first take words that have more than one meaning like pen which can mean writing pen or holding pen. When trying to translate the words individually the AI isn’t able to distinguish between the two pens without context. Even without context if the reference words are separated then the AI still fails to provide the correct translation of the words. The second is in image recognition, when an AI was presented the two pictures, one of a cow in a field and one of a cow on the beath and asked to categories items in the images it had surprising results. For the cow in the field “cow” was the first tag the AI gave the image but the AI was unable to tag “cow” with the beach image. This is because AI relies on looking for patterns to assign tags to the images and cows are commonly associated with grass so in the pictures where there was a cow but no grass the AI was unable to form the connection between the animal and the environment.

In chapter 4, Maggiori begins looking at some of the current practical applications of AI starting with AI in business. In this section Maggiori uses a lot of his own personal experiences with AI in business which was both hilarious and terrifying. Hilarious because the sheer stupidity of some of the people attempting to develop and work with Ai was immense and his comments on why these problems happen made it even better. However, it was terrifying because these levels of stupidity very much exist in business today and nothing is really being done about them which makes working in the industry or coming into the industry a daunting task for most unless you have the knowledge and experience to overcome these hurdles. One disturbing thing that Maggiori discusses is the censorship of their work in various different companies because the results aren’t what the executives wanted and the blatant lies he has been told over the years when being sought out or applying for positions and this shouldn’t be allowed to continue yet it does.

In chapter 5, Maggiori looks at the uses of AI in research. Maggiori draws on his own experience during his PhD and explains that tricks are often used to exaggerate and manipulate results which has become increasingly common and these tricks are taught to others behind the scenes creating a much larger problem. During his PhD, Maggiori personally witnessed how cherry-picking the result data to publish can have a much wider, negative impact than many people expect and what that means for the wider scientific community and I completely agree that it needs to stop but that can’t be done unless the problem of the pressure put on researchers to produce wanted results in exchange for funding is also dealt with and this creates a never ending circle without a solution at the moment but it is beginning to change as people are beginning to fight back and the lies and deceit in the scientific communities.

In chapter 6, Maggiori turns to the philosophical questions about whether we should be looking to AI to do jobs that can easily be done by humans currently with much higher accuracy and dependency. Maggiori delves into the question of consciousness and what makes a sentient being and whether or not AI can actually be developed to the point it could become conscious and what that would mean. The conclusion of the books makes me think that AI technology is far less advanced than people lead us to believe and compared to a human some AI have less functionality and problem solving skills than a toddler but others that require less complicated data input are more advanced and take over many minor tasks like number plate recognition as was mentioned earlier. This was definitely worth the read and if Maggiori write a more in-depth version of this book I will definitely pick it up.

This book provides a great overview and subsequent analysis of artificial intelligence (AI). It is written at a level that even a non-scientist can understand. He explains the capabilities of the technology and puts it usage into perspective. He also explores the business side of this technology and how humans can tend to apply a solution even before they have defined the problem. So, not only is this a good resource for understanding and thinking critically about AI but it is also a reminder of human nature and business models. I highly recommend this book for those who want to understand more about AI and for those that are currently heavy users of it.

The title makes it very clear the case the author Emmanuel will argue in the book. Each period, typically a decade or so brings about some technology trend which see excessive hype. In the past, that has been the case for Connectivity, Office Apps, Multimedia, Automation and now it is the turn of Artificial Intelligence. The book has a very good introduction to AI and the associated problems which are not allowing it to reach its claimed potential.

The start of the book has an introduction to current AI methods – especially machine learning. In contrast to rule-based applications, today applications learn from data sets and form patterns & associations. While there is no technical lingo, the explanations of how machine learning learns from images does require some technology awareness – though not too much. Today, the hype is so high that everybody feels pressured to say they are working on AI and also deriving spectacular results. Most funding, be in government or private is going to AI initiatives. Often the results employ clever wordplay to make the results seems impressive. One excellent example in the book is a news item which claimed AI can detect early onset of dementia 92% of the time. It turns out that in the sampling done typically only 10% shows early signs. So, declaring all as not being prone to dementia would be 90% accurate. Self-driving cars is discussed in a lot of detail in the book. Even minor alterations to road signs (quite possible due to either vandalism / weather / accidents) confuses self-driving cars. Other less frequent occurrences such as people stepping out of their cars in halted traffic etc are also problems. As a result, the timeline for operationalizing them has been shifting since many years. The author gives ChatGPT a go, and provides a list of questions which stumps it. There are also examples of mis-labelled images and why it happens. The conclusion is that machine learning as it stands today is inadequate for the next level.

There is an interesting discussion on consciousness in the later sections. A Google scientist had claimed he had seen signs of consciousness in machines and was later dismissed. While we do not have a conclusive answer, the process of debate in the book is fascinating. If you were to replace a few neurons in a human with artificial neurons, would the consciousness shift? And what if there was a total replacement?

The content of the book is excellent – it explains the current status of AI and the problems it must overcome. However, in all fairness, we need to discuss the success of AI as well. And those examples are many – tailored shopping recommendations, personalized learning, traveller experience and others. None of this is discussed and the examples are focussed only on failures. In that sense, this data cherry picking is what the author warns against. Nevertheless, that AI is not anywhere near Artificial General Intelligence, putting it at par with humans is true and well reinforced in the book. The book does well to warn that we must be wary of giving into hype around AI.

My rating: 4.25 / 5.

With hard-evidence backing the information and clear and concise concepts that speak to both experts and novices in the field of AI and ML, Smart Until It's Dumb is both intriguing and fun to read through. You come out wiser and more knowledgeable about how the technology is truly advancing rather than buying into myths and confounded rumors. A must-read for everyone who enjoy keeping themselves up-to-date with the happenings in the world.

I enjoyed this book. Aside from being highly informative, the writing style is conversational and engaging. The content is not technical and no background is really necessary. The book felt more like a discussion over coffee than it did a book. I’ve read a couple of other books on AI and the information is consistent between them, but the excellent “System Error” by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy M. Weinstein weaved their story through the context of social media. “Smart until it’s dumb” is more focused. This book also discussed a bit about consciousness and physics (e.g., is the brain a computer type of stuff) and some of the points about physics are excellent. And if I had any fears about AI, this book managed to assuage them. I strongly recommend this book for people interested in or are fearful of AI. Thank you to Netgalley and Cameron Publicity & Marketing Ltd for the digital review copy.

A nice piece of explanation of AI's capabilities and shortfalls that should help pump the brakes on everyone being so hyperbolic about AI in the wake of ChatGPT coming out. I view it as a companion piece to Janelle Shane's excellent You Look Like a Thing and I Love You; it's not as fun as that book, and less detailed, but it does add a bit to the discussion by virtue of being published some years later (and catching a little more AI evolution) and having a different perspective than Shane's, as Maggiori shares several anecdotes from his time working on AI projects at various companies with greater-or-lesser degrees of understanding of how to use AI.

A level-headed look at AI. A much needed counterpoint to the media hype (and doom and gloom) surrounding artificial intelligence.

Are you worried about the AI apocalypse around the corner?
Fear not.
An AI expert splashes cold water on the idea in this sober book.

He explains, "There is no clear pathway yet toward AGI."

He says it's like nuclear fusion: it's always 10 years away.

Also, the question of whether & how consciousness emerges from computer programs remains unsolved."

It's an excellent book to bring the AI hype back down to earth.