Book Review: Reprogramming the American Dream: From Rural America to Silicon Valley—Making AI Serve Us All by Kevin Scott
This book might be the most accurate explanation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for popular consumption published to date. Kevin Scott’s empirical description of the relationship of everyday human experience and advanced computer technology provides an optimistic vision of the beneficial applications of AI that are well within the grasp of society. Scott also addresses head on the challenges rural people face, with the very personal description of his own experiences growing up in a rural community and having to leave it to follow his interests in computer technology. Although having to leave loved ones to pursue a career has been a fact of life for many, Scott convincingly posits that AI can enable most everyone to live where they choose and also contribute meaningfully to society in a personally fulfilling way.
The interweaving of personal human experience with advanced machine learning sets this book apart from otherwise dry discourses on near incomprehensible technical content. Instead, Scott illustrates through real world examples that positive social impact is key to the implementation of AI. The author also addresses the dystopian dangers that are sometimes feared from the misuse of AI, and proposes safeguards against criminal and authoritarian appropriation of this powerful and inevitable technology—for skeptics of human ability to keep AI within safe bounds Scott allays much of this concern. A key theme of this book is human agency when interacting with machines—it’s the humans (we) who teach the machines what we want them to do, and not machines deciding what’s best for us.
To express empathy with those in rural flyover country Scott would have done better to reference Thomas Frank (Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?), instead of J. D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy) who wrote the foreword to this book. It’s likely the parts in Scott’s book that Vance said in the foreword he disagreed with were ones of solid social and economic common sense.
Empathy with and respect for persons who choose not to live in large urban centers is long overdue, and it’s healthy to note that rural economic disadvantage is both unjustified and readily avoidable. In this book Kevin Scott demonstrates how AI together with actual broadband throughout rural areas can be a positive game changer for everyone everywhere—let’s so change the game.
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