The risks and rewards of AI.
There are already way too many books on AI, including ones that were actually written by LLMs. So, why should you be interested in this one? Well, you’re here. That’s a start. But also, Daniela Rus. She won the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Award before her career even got cranking. While she’s best known for her work with robots, she is unique in her field because she has always focused on both the bodies and brains of intelligent machines. A few years ago, she and her students invented an entirely new kind of neural network architecture - one that gets around many of the common problems with today’s big foundational models.
The Mind's Mirror: Risk and Reward in the Age of AI is designed to help you understand how AI really works, what we should be excited about, what we have to fear, and what we might be able to do to ensure the safe and responsible use of AI. The book has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Natural History.
The future of smart machines.
Daniela Rus builds robots that fly, drive, bake, shapeshift, swim, hop, and think. She’s the first female director of MIT’s legendary Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, which is kind of like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but with robots. We spent every Monday for almost two years talking about her work and the good and bad of how AI and robotics could change the world.
The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots has been featured in The Boston Globe, Technology Review, and other publications. Hopefully the early chapters will help you see the world through the eyes of a roboticist - how many problems could be solved with intelligent machines. The third part analyzes the many dangers and risks, and how to mitigate them, and the second section gets into how it all works. The chapter on self-driving cars is one of my favorites.
A high-pressure assignment.
As a former competitive swimmer, I'm against glorifying the sport of rowing, but then the Viking Press and author Daniel James Brown asked if I'd be interested in adapting his massive bestseller The Boys in the Boat. I can't resist a great narrative, and the resulting book is now in its 24th printing.
This project taught me about the primacy of the core story and how a great tale can take so many different shapes and forms. After this adaptation, I worked on books with Susan Cain, Bill Nye, and Neil deGrasse Tyson.
It all started with boredom.
After a stint at a law firm in Ireland, I worked for a few years in the startup world before realizing I was dedicating more intellectual energy and passion to writing stories about this strange business universe than the jobs themselves. So I started shaping those stories into a novel about a young man who thinks he’s the reincarnation of Einstein. I wanted to call it The Generalyst, but the publisher convinced me The Wages of Genius was better. Eventually this led me into the first job I actually liked - editing for Popular Science - and I’ve been messing around with words for a living ever since.
Here are some nice things people said about the book:
“Humorous and prophetic.” - Booklist
“The debut of a genuinely talented writer.” - The San Francisco Bay Guardian
“A splendid comic creation.” -Seattle Times
Essays and other writings.
Back in my magazine days, I wrote two different columns for Popular Science, one on the latest gadgets, the other on science in fiction and the media. Lately I’ve started writing essays again on substack. They are meant to be short, humorous, and mildly intelligent. Take a look.
Also, here’s an early favorite from PopSci, on what might have happened if Einstein had ditched science to be a violinist.