Boston Review

AI for Good

edited by Daron Acemoglu

A look at how new technologies can be put to use in the creation of a more just society.

Artifi cial Intelligence (AI) is not likely to make humans redundant. Nor will it create superintelligence anytime soon. But it will make huge advances in the next two decades, revolutionizing medicine, entertainment, and transport, transforming jobs and markets, and vastly increasing the amount of information that governments and companies have about individuals. AI for Good leads off with economist and best-selling author Daron Acemoglu, who argues that there are reasons to be concerned about these developments. AI research today pays too much attention to the technological hurdles ahead, without enough attention to its disruptive eff ects on the fabric of society: displacing workers while failing to create new opportunities for them and threatening to undermine democratic governance itself.

Yet the direction of AI development is not preordained. Acemoglu argues for AI’s potential to create shared prosperity and bolster democratic freedoms. But directing it to that task will take great eff ort. It will require new funding and regulation, new norms and priorities for developers themselves, and regulations of new technologies and their applications.

At the intersection of technology and economic justice, this book brings together experts—economists, legal scholars, policy makers, and developers—to debate these challenges and consider what steps tech companies can take to ensure the advancement of AI does not further diminish the economic prospects of the most vulnerable population groups.

Daron Acemoglu is Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics at MIT and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is coauthor of Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor.

June | 6 x 9, 192 pp.

US $19.95T/$25.95 CAN paper

978-1-946511-62-1

Distributed for Boston Review

Ancestors

edited by Ed Pavlić and Evie Shockley

Noted novelists, poets, and essayists, including Samuel R. Delany, Min Jin Lee, Joy Harjo, and Zadie Smith, consider how we are shaped by the past.

It is rare now for people to stay where they were raised, and when we encounter one another—whether in person or online—it is usually in contexts that obscure if not outright hide details about our past. But even in moments of pure selfinvention, we are always shaped by the past. In Ancestors, some of today’s most imaginative writers—including science fi ction master Samuel R. Delany, US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, and novelist Zadie Smith—consider what it means to be made and fashioned by others. Are we shaped by grandparents, family, the deep past, political forebears, inherited social and economic circumstances? Can we choose our family, or is blood always thicker? And looking forward, what will it mean to be ancestors ourselves, and how will our descendants remember us?

Ed Pavlić is the author of Live at the Bitter End; Who Can Aff ord to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listener and other books. He is Distinguished Research Professor in the English Department and in the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia. Evie Shockley is an American poet and author of the new black and semiautomatic, a fi nalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She is Professor of English at Rutgers University.

Contributors include Samuel R. Delany, Tananarive Due, Andrea Lawlor, Min Jin Lee, Joy Harjo, Jericho Brown, Brian Teare, Teju Cole, Domenica Ruta, Zadie Smith, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Daisy Hernández, Rita Indiana, Ibi Zoboi, Edwidge Danticat

March | 6 x 9, 192 pp.

US $19.95T/$25.95 CAN paper

978-1-946511-55-3

Distributed for Boston Review