BOOKS OF THE WEEK

Ai for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter by Josh Tyrangiel

ABOUT THE BOOK

In contrast to the wave of noisy polemics around AI, AI For Good explores how, in practice, it can actually improve our lives and tells the stories of everyday citizens at the forefront of this new “AI entrepreneurship.”

AI is often framed as a force of radical transformation, either catapulting us into a utopian future or dragging us toward existential ruin. But this book tells a different story. It’s not about high-profile tech CEOs who want to use AI to “break shit,” but about a bunch of smart pragmatists using AI to make the world better.

Josh Tyrangiel’s journey into AI began with a late-night YouTube video featuring General Gustave Perna, the retired four-star general who orchestrated the distribution of Covid vaccines during Operation Warp Speed. Perna’s success—and the end of the pandemic—depended on AI’s practical ability to synthesize and standardize vast amounts of logistical data. AI wasn’t the hero of the story—it was the tool that helped real people get things done.

This book follows those people, who make up a kind of AI counterculture. It explores AI’s quiet revolution in government services, medicine, education, and human connection—places where it’s being used to amplify human judgment rather than replace it. It tells the stories of teachers, doctors, and bureaucrats who often stumbled into AI as a means to solve specific, tangible problems, often with no prior software expertise.

While the loudest voices in AI debate doomsday scenarios and trillion-dollar market opportunities, this book focuses on those working in the messy, incremental, but deeply impactful space of AI practice. However, there is one big caveat—success is not guaranteed. Change is hard. Institutions move slowly. But even in failure there are lessons for everyone who’s interested in using AI—carefully, thoughtfully—to build a better world today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Josh Tyrangiel is a writer for The Atlantic. He was previously the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek and chief content officer for Bloomberg Media. A twelve-time Emmy and Peabody Award–winning producer, he created Vice News Tonight on HBO and has produced numerous feature-length documentaries for HBO, Netflix, and Apple TV.

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BOOKS OF THE WEEK

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell 

ABOUT THE BOOK

'After reading Mitchell’s guide, you’ll know what you don’t know and what other people don’t know, even though they claim to know it. And that’s invaluable'' The New York Times

A leading computer scientist brings human sense to the AI bubble

No recent scientific enterprise has been so alluring, terrifying and filled with extravagant promise and frustrating setbacks as artificial intelligence. Writing with clarity and passion, leading AI researcher Melanie Mitchell offers a captivating account of modern-day artificial intelligence.

Flavoured with personal stories and a twist of humour, Artificial Intelligence illuminates the workings of machines that mimic human learning, perception, language, creativity and common sense. Weaving together advances in AI with cognitive science and philosophy, Mitchell probes the extent to which today's 'smart' machines can actually think or understand, and whether AI even requires such elusive human qualities at all.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans provides readers with an accessible and clear-eyed view of the AI landscape, what the field has actually accomplished, how much further it has to go and what it means for all of our futures.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Melanie Mitchell is a professor of Computer Science at Portland State University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms and Complexity: A Guided Tour, which won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award.

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BOOKS OF THE WEEK

Asianism and the Fall of Empire: India's Road to Freedom by Mithi Mukherjee

ABOUT THE BOOK 

Offering a new global perspective on India's freedom struggle, Asianism and the Fall of Empire identifies the rise of Asianism in the early twentieth century as the origin and primary driving force of the resistance movements that brought down the British Empire.

Thoroughly researched and thought-provoking, the book ties together into a single sweeping narrative two contrasting, conflicting forms of anticolonialism: the nonviolent resistance movement under Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa and the militant movement that culminated in the war on British India by the Indian National Army under Bose in alliance with the Japanese army. Asia emerges in this breakthrough retelling not as an inert geographical category, but as a singular agent of change in modern world history.

As Asian powers become central to global politics once again in the twenty-first century, Mithi Mukherjee's timely and perceptive book traces India's historical relations with its neighbours and presents a strong case for transnational solidarities against ethnonationalist discourses.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mithi Mukherjee is Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of India in the Shadows of Empire: A Legal and Political History, 1774–1950.

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Our mail order service ships books in India and Overseas

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