Doctorow is at his best in the space in between snark and real insight. Unfortunately, A.I. is not particularly amenable to that kind of treatment. He is superb, as expected, on the anatomy of Silicon Valley rhetoric and self-aggrandizement ... But his instinct toward humanism, admirable as it is, can lead to oversimplified generalizations about the technology itself ... Still, Doctorow holds technology up to a standard that has otherwise been forgotten: that it should contain the potential for human liberation, in an anarchic spirit of barriers tumbling. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how relevant that vision remains at this point, especially given the drastic change that artificial intelligence represents.
Doctorow speeds through this entertaining primer with his usual vivid analogies, righteous ire and snarky asides ... But as the central metaphor illustrates, this is not an anti-AI polemic and Doctorow is no purist ... This is the story of a remarkable new technology rolled out in the most reckless, self-serving way one could imagine, by the worst people, for the worst reasons.
