AI For Good: Can artificial intelligence become a force for humanity?

AI For Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter

by Josh Tyrangiel

Published by Simon & Schuster

257 pages 

$29

  By Max Chafkin

 

Even for sceptics, it’s getting harder to argue that the obsession with artificial intelligence is pure hype. AI advances are fuelling a historic stock market boom that may bust, but the responses that come from the latest versions of ChatGPT and Claude still often feel like magic. Pretty much everyone in the business world thinks that AI advances will inevitably lead to better products and lower labour costs.

 

That promise lies in the future, but the reality is that AI is here and changing society. In AI for Good Josh Tyrangiel charts the present-day impact of this technological revolution with case studies in which researchers, educators and entrepreneurs, mostly from outside Silicon Valley, try to do something positive with AI.

 

 

The book grew out of a regular column Tyrangiel wrote for The Washington Post in 2023 and 2024, and it is useful at a moment when workers are being asked to adopt Claude, ChatGPT and similar tools. The result is the kind of book designed to be enthusiastically recommended by chief innovation officers and management consultants. For better or worse, your boss will love it.

 

The first quarter of the book covers the development of Khanmigo, created by OpenAI and the non-profit Khan Academy. The reception is mixed. At one point, after quoting a parade of adults who are awed, by the potential of AI, Tyrangiel meets actual eighth graders who are, he reports, “wildly unimpressed.” One calls the chatbot “not close to the same as an actual teacher.”

 

This seems troubling, though the number of school districts using Khanmigo is growing quickly anyway. “The marketplace has rendered its own verdict,” Tyrangiel writes.

 

Next we’re off to the Cleveland Clinic, where a new machine learning system designed to help doctors flag patients at highest risk for sepsis coincides with a lower rate of sepsis deaths, likely catching some cases that doctors would have missed.

 

Despite improvements, the software continues to produce a number of false positives and it’s not clear if the AI deserves much credit for the drop in fatalities. As Tyrangiel notes, it’s possible Cleveland Clinic employees were on higher alert and caught more cases than usual because they knew their work was being matched against the AI.

 

The book’s strongest section involves the efforts of an MIT researcher named Kristy Johnson, who uses AI to make sense of the vocalisations of her developmentally disabled son. Johnson developed her tool by crowdsourcing audio recordings of nonverbal children along with their parents’ judgments about what those sounds mean. It’s a thrilling account, as an expression of both technical audacity and parental affection.

 

AI for Good is structured like a travelogue and the author’s prose is breezy, concise and well observed. But travellers don’t always come home with a nuanced understanding of what they’ve seen.

 

The book’s opening scene is a particular disappointment in this regard. Tyrangiel recounts his “AI awakening,” while watching a YouTube video of a conference put on by Palantir, the US tech analytics firm and defence contractor.

 

In the video, a Trump administration official describes the hiring of Palantir employees who build him a data dashboard to track the materials needed to deliver millions of Covid vaccines around the country.

 

The choice of Palantir as an example sits strangely with the medical workers and teachers who populate the rest of Tyrangiel’s account. The company, co-founded by the far-right venture capitalist Peter Thiel, provides software to support the Trump administration’s violent immigration raids.

 

Late in the book, Tyrangiel says he hopes that AI for Good will inspire others to use technology to solve social problems. But at a time when companies are laying off  thousands in the name of automation, and when trillions of dollars in paper wealth depends on convincing more people that chatbots are worth their time and money, it’s ultimately an argument so predictable that AI could have come up with it. 

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The reviewer is author of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and the Rise of the Silicon Valley Oligarchs.

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