New Book Review: "The Threshold"
New book review for The Threshold: Leading in the Age of AI, by Nick Chatrath, Diversion Books, 2023:
Copy provided by Amazon.
In the introductory pages of this book, Chatrath states that "this book functions as a first foray into exploring what good leadership looks like in the present and coming ages of AI. John McCarthy defined AI as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines. I hope to expand your concept of what it is to be a human leader in a time that challenges our former ways of being with technology. Where technologists start with the question 'What can we automate?' and ethicists start with the question 'Should we automate this?', I start with the leadership question 'How can leaders promote flourishing as technology advances?' This book therefore equips you to forge a new synthesis between machines and humanity in the face of future technology-related disruptions. This new synthesis, which I have termed 'threshold leadership', is the subject of this book."
The author later states that "Things that ideally should not happen unfortunately happen all the time in organizations. Is there an individual who thinks, 'Oh my, I should not have done this'? Sadly, I have found this ownership of error to be rare. Software product developers are often so removed from the consequences of their work that many don't even think of themselves as leaders who have a disproportionate impact on the world. As one senior leader in a large tech company recently told me, 'For all I know, I might have been in a situation where I contributed to an AI algorithm written wrongly,' Looking down she added quietly, 'Do I even know?' This is not about throwing software developers under the bus. The reality is that software developers don't have any say in, or any perspective about, what they are building. They often work on a very small slice of a bigger vision."