AI For Good?
Pending book release. Pre-pub excerpt from The Atlantic.
The Secret to Understanding AI
“Imagine the tech without the tech companies.”
By Josh Tyrangiel
In the before times—before machines could hallucinate, before compute was a noun—it was not uncommon to go several weeks without someone telling me the world was about to end. Similarly, a whole season might pass without anyone assuring me that it was also, simultaneously, about to become perfect.
That particular luxury died on November 30, 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. What followed was less a news cycle than a weather event—a tropical depression that would not budge. Within weeks, millions of people had their first experience with generative AI. Within months, every major technology company had announced its own version of a large language model, or a partnership, or a pivot. Venture capital arrived drooling. Most people in tech think about money, but AI-profit projections are different—like CFO fan fiction, written in Excel. In 2023, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that $4.4 trillion in annual corporate profits could be up for grabs from generative AI alone. Morgan Stanley estimated $40 trillion more in operational efficiencies. The words artificial intelligence went from obscurity to a constant hum, present in every earnings call, every school-board meeting, and far too many arguments at dinner tables.
Yet for all of the noise, a simple question stayed unanswered: What exactly was this new technology going to do for people? Not for corporations or the billionaires who aspired to become trillionaires, but for people with mortgages and sick parents and children struggling to learn things…
May 12th release date.
AMAZON BLURB
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.
I have too many books in play at the moment (about 8), but I'll be adding this to the list when it's released.
SOME OTHER READS JUST ADDED TO THE STASH
Dispatches from Grief is intensely personal for this "Girl Dad."
ERRATUM: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
The greatest pitfall in the search for extraterrestrial life—according to science fiction, anyway—is foolhardy researchers somehow bringing aliens to Earth to wreak havoc.
But after decades of exploring our seemingly sterile solar system, real-world scientists today are much more concerned with the opposite problem: The possibility that Earth’s life will escape our planet to contaminate other worlds, sabotaging the quest to find any genuine “second genesis” of biology around the sun. Imagine that a multibillion-dollar robotic mission found wriggling microbes on Mars and that follow-up studies then revealing those “aliens” had DNA and other biomolecular machinery that showed they were emigrants from Earth.
Astrobiologically speaking, we would have met the enemy—and it would be us. Taking a cue from sci-fi, you might call such life-forms “Klingons,” for their presumptive hitchhike to the Red Planet as stowaways in spacecraft sent from Earth.
“Planetary protection” is the term scientists use for efforts to prevent otherworldly invasions of all sorts; to date, most of it has focused on Mars, but the practice applies to all potentially habitable environments within reach of our spacecraft. In the 1970s, for example, NASA did its best to keep its twin Viking landers Klingon-free before launching them to Mars. And if the NASA-led international Mars Sample Return effort ever manages to bring its precious payload back to Earth, the agency will be tasked with quarantining those specimens as if they contain extreme biohazards rather than lifeless bits of rock and soil…
Imagine my surprise. apropos of some prior riffs on astrophysics and exobiology.
CHEERS...
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