Frankenstein’s Regrets

Artificial intelligence is not easy to write about: The discourse around it is so extreme that trying to find one’s footing in the scrum can feel hopeless. But what is AI, and what are its possibilities and threats? Reviewing The AI Paradox, by the computer scientist Virginia Dignum, for Spring Books, Ben Tarnoff considers many different answers to these questions. Charting the ways in which AI might pose a challenge to the work and lives of its human makers, Tarnoff asks not whether AI might break free from its master but if its very proximity to humanity might be the problem. “What if AI is better understood” not as some kind of extra human possibility, but instead “as Frankenstein’s monster—a man-made yet alien entity, by turns familiar and strange, unpredictable and not fully fathomable, semi-obedient at best?” Read “What Is Artificial Intelligence Anyway?”

There Will Always Be the Odeon

Jay McInerney’s latest novel, See You on the Other Side, opens at the Odeon in Manhattan. “Stepping out of the cab into the twilight,” McInerney writes, “he felt a rush of nostalgia at the sight of the red-and-white neon sign hovering above West Broadway like an old movie title materializing on a dark screen.” The glamorous Tribeca brasserie was made famous, or maybe more famous, in McInerney’s zippy and funny 1984 debut, Bright Lights, Big City, and McInerney’s readers already know what to expect when he evokes this specific corner of the world. But something has changed in his new novel, something is off—notes Erin Somers in her review for Spring Books. The people are older; the economy is less robust and profitable, the world more fragile and uncertain, and the city that sits at the center of his novels is more unequal, more divided, more expensive than it has ever been. If McInerney’s first novels about New York explored a city full of possibility and careerism—and some cynicism—now they offer a different tale: One of a city that is growing old and struggling to remain alive. Read “Jay McInerney’s Yuppie New York”