Category: book reviews

The Good-Enough Life by Avram Alpert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Greatness is a problem. As author Avram Alpert tells it, you can trace a lot of what is wrong in Western society to its obsession with greatness. We quickly discern hierarchies, trying to name the best idea, best technology, best group, best person. This cultural hang-up is a toxic ingredient in our individualism and relative misery, our poison politics, and our abuse of the planet. We desperately need some humility and willingness to embrace good-enough approaches to our lives, careers, and policies, so we can all flourish to some degree and have a chance at returning some balance to the Earth.

I found The Good-Enough Life to be an original and compelling argument deserving of our attention in this moment. It sits nicely alongside (and cites) other recent critiques that identify meritocracy as a key cause of our contemporary problems. Pulling not just from philosophy, but from history, sociology, psychology, and literature to make his argument, Alpert offers a very readable book, as far as philosophy goes.

I am particularly drawn to his argument that we lost the value of humility. Here Alpert looks to Aristotelian virtue ethics as a guide, since each virtue is defined as a mean—a balance between vices. Too much unearned confidence is vicious, as is humility that abandons any agency. We want to find just enough humility to take action on what we know, but be mindful of what we don’t know or can’t do alone. Alpert cautions us here against fully embracing Aristotle’s approach, since his classical definition of virtue is meant to differentiate great men. Magnanimous (great-souled) men, exuding virtue, were better than other men and should be idolized. Its a fine thing to strive for virtue, but we mustn’t abandon dignity for all. Once again, humans seem only to eager to find reasons to treat someone as lesser and to believe they deserve their lesser status.

Its hard to imagine a good-enough policy solution from this book. Alpert is careful not to say we must throw off capitalism and embrace socialism. Closely reading both Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, Alpert lays out pros and cons illustrated by history (and overconfidence) where each economic system has fallen undemocratically flat. I agree that what we need to do is aim for more democracy. Greatness chips away at egalitarianism, at equal rights. We need approaches that return us to more equal circumstances. That’s what good-enoughness offers us in Alpert’s view. Its what the social contract is meant to ensure; we each give up some of our greatness to ensure no one is poor and unprotected.

The book lacks the call to action that similar books might have in specific policy recommendations or ways to reorient your personal behavior and mindset. But I suppose when your main argument is about eschewing greatness and embracing more humility, your prescriptions should be modest.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this book and recommend it.

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Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting by Shannon Vallor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues is the best book on technology ethics. It is not a practical guide to ethical decision-making in technology. It won’t tell you what to do given a specific dilemma. Instead, it’s much deeper—a careful philosophical argument for a global framework for virtue ethics that meaningfully engages with the entwinement of contemporary technology and civilization. If you want a learn how to work toward human flourishing in the age of AI, gene editing, etc., this will tell you what capacities to work on and how they can help you ask better questions and work with others to build good sociotechnical futures.

The first part of the book makes the argument for a shared set of ethical ideas across virtue traditions in Buddhism, Confucianism, and Western (Aristotelian) philosophy. This allows Vallor to argue that we can conceive a global ethical framework to address technologies that are global in scope. These are densest academic chapters of the book. But they establish some important concepts like “moral attention,” which help us understand how the “technomoral” virtues, eventually defined in Chapter 6, work.

Building on the classical virtue traditions, Vallor identifies 12 virtues for the 21st century: Honesty, Self-Control, Humility, Justice, Courage, Empathy, Care, Civility, Flexibility, Perspective, Magnanimity, and Technomoral Wisdom. Some of these are familiar virtues with definitions updated for the times. Others are new, like Care, which embraces feminist care ethics. And some do not mean what their common word definitions would indicate. For instance, the technomoral virtue of Civility is a “more robust form of cosmopolitan civic-mindedness, a reliably and intelligently expressed disposition to value communal ethical life in a global technosocial context and to act accordingly.”

The last section of the book examines four technological domains—social media, surveillance, robots, and human enhancement technology—and how we should use the technomoral virtues to navigate their ethical complexities and find paths toward designing, using, and regulating the technologies to achieve global human flourishing. Although the book came out in 2016, Vallor’s examinations of social media and artificial intelligence are still relevant and compelling. She concludes the book by discussing human enhancement technologies like gene editing because it forces us to literally ask: What is human flourishing? What is precious about humanity? What defines human dignity? She calls this “Knowing what to wish for” and argues that these fundamental questions require our collective technomoral Wisdom—the supreme virtue of applying our various cultivated virtues to good ends.

In my own research and pedagogy on ethical responsibilities of engineers and technologists, I have concluded that some version of cultivated virtue is necessary to ensure we have folks building our technologies with eyes wide open, appropriate humility, and a civic-mindedness that transcends narrow perspectives and economic assumptions. If you care about this, you should read this book. If you are interested in what it takes to be virtuous in the 21st century, you should read this book. Highly recommended!

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Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is such a brilliant and timely little novel. It touches on so many important ethical questions about AI/robots: care robots, AI replacing jobs, robots/AI as human-like species deserving rights versus being like appliances, philosophy of mind, and more. I’m excited to talk to my students at Olin about this book. It’s our summer reading for incoming first years.

Ishiguro’s “Klara” is an artificial friend (AF). She is a care robot (like the many, notably from Japan, that are developed to be companions to humans and help them with social-emotional health). Her objective is to ensure the child she is acquired for is not lonely. She believes the worst thing a human can be is lonely. Her child Josie is a little sick and lives far away from others. The novel covers Klara’s efforts to serve Josie well.

The novel starts in the store where Klara is for sale. She is our narrator. When we meet her, she is starting to form assumptions about the world. Her observational skills are unusually good for an AF, but her narrative is of course flawed both because of the limits of her technology (cleverly illustrated by Ishiguro) and the limits of her experience.

Ishiguro is not the first to offer a first person perspective to an AI. Many fine examples, especially the Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy beginning with Ancillary Justice, come to mind. What I love about Klara and the Sun is that it’s a bildungsroman—one of my favorite genres—for a young robot. This allows us to explore some of the key ethical questions from a unique perspective and provides for the eponymous plot line written stylistically as a fusion of science fiction and realism.

The book is a fast read, filled with clever imagery and symbolism, which open and close the narrative elegantly. I would read this even if I didn’t have to, and I recommend that you do too.

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