As someone who’s read the book and followed several of your reviews, I think your points on the editing and layout are well taken, and fair. That said, I felt the way the review was structured, bookending your take on the message with frustrations about the medium through which it was conveyed, ended up taking away from what is, in my view, a very significant and timely message.
While I share your concerns about the typesetting and presentation, I do wish the review had been a bit more gracious in highlighting the importance of the ideas themselves, which are both important and under-represented in the current discourse. Your 3.5 rating reflects that balance, but the tone of the rest of the review has quite the opposite effect.
On substance, a couple of clarifications: the discussion about AI “learning” is meant more broadly to include algorithmic systems in general. TikTok’s feedback loop, for instance, is exactly the kind of learning the book points to. And the critique that the book glosses over issues of algorithmic control isn’t entirely fair. Chapter 4 deals with that in depth. There are several other issues like that which I feel the book does a far better job of covering than the review makes it out to be. The book isn't perfect but is an important addition to the current discourse.
Overall, I appreciated your review, but I found myself wishing it had centered more on the ideas than on your frustration with their presentation.
Appreciate the comment! I am conscious that the review may have inappropriately emphasized what could be seen as less important parts of the book, and I could have spent more time on the important points therein. Having said that, I would then also have needed to tackle some of the pretty big conceptual blind spots in the book as it tended to sidestep things like ethics entirely - which I suppose is fair enough from a book that's probably aimed more at communicating "this is what will happen" rather than "this is what should happen", but still felt like a pretty big omission.
Despite its flaws, I agree it's a useful and welcome addition to the discourse. I'm glad the author has been making the same points in other mediums, like podcasts, so some of those get broader exposure.
Yes, I agree that ethics could have been explored more fully. Fair point.
Having said that, my concern with the way the review is structured is that it places disproportionate emphasis on the possible use of ChatGPT in the writing process, which, even if true, shouldn’t become the reason the book is avoided altogether by readers.
The unfortunate reality is that many readers today are predisposed to tune out the moment they hear a review questioning the usage of ChatGPT.
My worry is this framing may prevent people from engaging with the substance of the book at all. I do agree that parts of the text felt repetitive, but I actually found his use of analogies like the shipping container and barcode fresh and instructive in making very new points with familiar examples.
Whether or not AI assisted in its creation, the underlying argument deserves to be engaged with on its own terms. I’d hate to see readers overlook a thoughtful and original contribution simply because they had clubbed it in the AI-generated bucket.
It's yours to consider but as someone who believes good ideas make us collectively better as a society, I would urge you to engage more with the message in your review and give it more air so that it doesn't prematurely discourage readers from ever getting to it .
I say this as someone who has read your many reviews with interest, almost all of which engage a lot more with the message and the motives rather than the presentation.
Appreciate the open dialogue and the service that you do for all us book-lovers.
Likewise appreciate the gentle thoughtful pushback here!
I am not actually opposed to using GenAI for writing, IFF - if and only if - the result is better for it. In this case, I don't think it is, and to be clear, I am not 100% confident AI was used here.
I don't like to do substantive edits for the reviews after posting because then comments lose context and things just get messy - but what I will do is post a comment at the start to point people to the comments here. I think this thread provides some good additional context.
At the end of the day, it's an early self-published version. The author has mentioned in one of the podcasts that his publisher brings out the edited and professionally produced book next year but that he was keen to get the message out there at the earliest.
Sounds like it was interesting, if not a bit of a frustrating read. An analogy about AI I have used is that of "metallic type". Imagine a scenario where monastic scribes are given this technology in the form of a typewriter. They can now do their job more efficiently - making individual copies of documents. It would be seen as impressive, but hardly revolutionary. However, the same technology can be used to create a printing press. If the job of the scribe is turned into that of a typesetter, the one person can now make many thousands of copies of the same document. However, this re-imagining of the job and the process of document creation is required to allow for the new application of the technology. There are three paths: old job+old tech, old job+new tech, and new job+new tech. With AI, we should be similarly thinking about what are the typesetter type jobs and processes that weren't feasible/possible before.
Very true, with two additional points - first, I would argue there is also the category of "new job+old tech", as is evidenced from all the process re-engineering and optimization potential in most organizations. Things can often be reorganized to be much better without necessarily introducing any new technology.
Second, what makes this job and process imagining much more challenging now is that AI capabilities are such a fast-moving target. What is possible now is very different from what was possible six months ago which was very different what was possible 12 months ago and so on - and this re-imagination process is slow.
Any serious critic would start by engaging with the central premise of a book, its argument, its intellectual contribution, its relevance. Only then, if needed, would they move to questions of presentation or structure.
This review does the opposite. It opens with a complaint about tables and diagrams.
Of all things, tables and diagrams!!!
No credible review starts there.
There is a difference between a review and a rant. The reader comes away knowing what irritated the reviewer, not what the book is actually about.
Seriously, who cares if the reviewer got triggered? We're here to learn if the book has good ideas worth engaging in.
Is the book worth reading? Does it contain important ideas? The review says something about that but it's deliberately tucked in between two emotional rants.
Even where it gestures toward argument, it loses credibility.
As someone who has actually read the book, I can say that much of what’s asserted here simply isn’t true (something that is subtly pointed out by another commenter here). The book is about how to think about relevance and advantage in the age of AI and how to think through the effects that will transform systems, not an advocacy of what the new systems should look like. It is NOT a moral treatise, and certainly not a call to shoehorn ethics into every discussion of technology. The reviewer’s insistence on that frame says more about their own biases than about the book itself.
This is quite clearly not a review. It’s a venting session.
A thoughtful reader deserves better than to know that you were either having a bad day or just venting some other personally quirky frustration about the frequency with which tables appear in a book.
As someone who’s read the book and followed several of your reviews, I think your points on the editing and layout are well taken, and fair. That said, I felt the way the review was structured, bookending your take on the message with frustrations about the medium through which it was conveyed, ended up taking away from what is, in my view, a very significant and timely message.
While I share your concerns about the typesetting and presentation, I do wish the review had been a bit more gracious in highlighting the importance of the ideas themselves, which are both important and under-represented in the current discourse. Your 3.5 rating reflects that balance, but the tone of the rest of the review has quite the opposite effect.
On substance, a couple of clarifications: the discussion about AI “learning” is meant more broadly to include algorithmic systems in general. TikTok’s feedback loop, for instance, is exactly the kind of learning the book points to. And the critique that the book glosses over issues of algorithmic control isn’t entirely fair. Chapter 4 deals with that in depth. There are several other issues like that which I feel the book does a far better job of covering than the review makes it out to be. The book isn't perfect but is an important addition to the current discourse.
Overall, I appreciated your review, but I found myself wishing it had centered more on the ideas than on your frustration with their presentation.
Appreciate the comment! I am conscious that the review may have inappropriately emphasized what could be seen as less important parts of the book, and I could have spent more time on the important points therein. Having said that, I would then also have needed to tackle some of the pretty big conceptual blind spots in the book as it tended to sidestep things like ethics entirely - which I suppose is fair enough from a book that's probably aimed more at communicating "this is what will happen" rather than "this is what should happen", but still felt like a pretty big omission.
Despite its flaws, I agree it's a useful and welcome addition to the discourse. I'm glad the author has been making the same points in other mediums, like podcasts, so some of those get broader exposure.
Yes, I agree that ethics could have been explored more fully. Fair point.
Having said that, my concern with the way the review is structured is that it places disproportionate emphasis on the possible use of ChatGPT in the writing process, which, even if true, shouldn’t become the reason the book is avoided altogether by readers.
The unfortunate reality is that many readers today are predisposed to tune out the moment they hear a review questioning the usage of ChatGPT.
My worry is this framing may prevent people from engaging with the substance of the book at all. I do agree that parts of the text felt repetitive, but I actually found his use of analogies like the shipping container and barcode fresh and instructive in making very new points with familiar examples.
Whether or not AI assisted in its creation, the underlying argument deserves to be engaged with on its own terms. I’d hate to see readers overlook a thoughtful and original contribution simply because they had clubbed it in the AI-generated bucket.
It's yours to consider but as someone who believes good ideas make us collectively better as a society, I would urge you to engage more with the message in your review and give it more air so that it doesn't prematurely discourage readers from ever getting to it .
I say this as someone who has read your many reviews with interest, almost all of which engage a lot more with the message and the motives rather than the presentation.
Appreciate the open dialogue and the service that you do for all us book-lovers.
Likewise appreciate the gentle thoughtful pushback here!
I am not actually opposed to using GenAI for writing, IFF - if and only if - the result is better for it. In this case, I don't think it is, and to be clear, I am not 100% confident AI was used here.
I don't like to do substantive edits for the reviews after posting because then comments lose context and things just get messy - but what I will do is post a comment at the start to point people to the comments here. I think this thread provides some good additional context.
That's fair.
At the end of the day, it's an early self-published version. The author has mentioned in one of the podcasts that his publisher brings out the edited and professionally produced book next year but that he was keen to get the message out there at the earliest.
Sounds like it was interesting, if not a bit of a frustrating read. An analogy about AI I have used is that of "metallic type". Imagine a scenario where monastic scribes are given this technology in the form of a typewriter. They can now do their job more efficiently - making individual copies of documents. It would be seen as impressive, but hardly revolutionary. However, the same technology can be used to create a printing press. If the job of the scribe is turned into that of a typesetter, the one person can now make many thousands of copies of the same document. However, this re-imagining of the job and the process of document creation is required to allow for the new application of the technology. There are three paths: old job+old tech, old job+new tech, and new job+new tech. With AI, we should be similarly thinking about what are the typesetter type jobs and processes that weren't feasible/possible before.
Very true, with two additional points - first, I would argue there is also the category of "new job+old tech", as is evidenced from all the process re-engineering and optimization potential in most organizations. Things can often be reorganized to be much better without necessarily introducing any new technology.
Second, what makes this job and process imagining much more challenging now is that AI capabilities are such a fast-moving target. What is possible now is very different from what was possible six months ago which was very different what was possible 12 months ago and so on - and this re-imagination process is slow.
Any serious critic would start by engaging with the central premise of a book, its argument, its intellectual contribution, its relevance. Only then, if needed, would they move to questions of presentation or structure.
This review does the opposite. It opens with a complaint about tables and diagrams.
Of all things, tables and diagrams!!!
No credible review starts there.
There is a difference between a review and a rant. The reader comes away knowing what irritated the reviewer, not what the book is actually about.
Seriously, who cares if the reviewer got triggered? We're here to learn if the book has good ideas worth engaging in.
Is the book worth reading? Does it contain important ideas? The review says something about that but it's deliberately tucked in between two emotional rants.
Even where it gestures toward argument, it loses credibility.
As someone who has actually read the book, I can say that much of what’s asserted here simply isn’t true (something that is subtly pointed out by another commenter here). The book is about how to think about relevance and advantage in the age of AI and how to think through the effects that will transform systems, not an advocacy of what the new systems should look like. It is NOT a moral treatise, and certainly not a call to shoehorn ethics into every discussion of technology. The reviewer’s insistence on that frame says more about their own biases than about the book itself.
This is quite clearly not a review. It’s a venting session.
A thoughtful reader deserves better than to know that you were either having a bad day or just venting some other personally quirky frustration about the frequency with which tables appear in a book.
Not impressed!