rick2's review against another edition
2.0
I wanted to significantly more from the “CTO of Microsoft.”
this is mostly collection of feel good AI/ML use cases, low-grade Microsoft propaganda, and some average storytelling. There’s some sweeping statements about how the technology is going to reshape everything that we know about work, and so on and so forth. other people have done it better. The use cases with agriculture I agreed with, and there was an attempt to kind of bridge the technical to the human, but It just didn’t quite work.
I thought the attempts to wrestle with national and regional economics around rural communities and across the US mostly failed. Most of it is super service level and seem to mostly the window dressing. It’s like hearing ESPN statistics about football players. They’re kind of cool I guess but they don’t really tell you anything deeper about what’s going on in the game.
there’s some nods to how Microsoft is trying to work with local communities and encourage people to go into a career at Microsoft. Cool I guess. Mostly a miss and at worst these parts felt like PR nonsense.
And lastly, there’s some personal stories that were decent, but realistically not super well written or incredibly compelling. The rest of the book was pretty mediocre, so I wish this had been the focus and I might have at least learned a bit about what it takes to be CTO of a multinational tech company.
I think this book tried to be too many things and ended up not being very good at any one thing. It’s interesting at times but not anything special.
this is mostly collection of feel good AI/ML use cases, low-grade Microsoft propaganda, and some average storytelling. There’s some sweeping statements about how the technology is going to reshape everything that we know about work, and so on and so forth. other people have done it better. The use cases with agriculture I agreed with, and there was an attempt to kind of bridge the technical to the human, but It just didn’t quite work.
I thought the attempts to wrestle with national and regional economics around rural communities and across the US mostly failed. Most of it is super service level and seem to mostly the window dressing. It’s like hearing ESPN statistics about football players. They’re kind of cool I guess but they don’t really tell you anything deeper about what’s going on in the game.
there’s some nods to how Microsoft is trying to work with local communities and encourage people to go into a career at Microsoft. Cool I guess. Mostly a miss and at worst these parts felt like PR nonsense.
And lastly, there’s some personal stories that were decent, but realistically not super well written or incredibly compelling. The rest of the book was pretty mediocre, so I wish this had been the focus and I might have at least learned a bit about what it takes to be CTO of a multinational tech company.
I think this book tried to be too many things and ended up not being very good at any one thing. It’s interesting at times but not anything special.
adamhecktman's review against another edition
5.0
When I picked this up, I thought it was going to be a more digitally fluent version of Hillbilly Elegy (maybe because the forward was by J. D. Vance). Could not have been more wrong, and I thought that this was the most thoughtful treatment on the subject of Artificial Intelligence that I have read. Unlike the others, it is not a treatise on why we should fear AI as a job-destroying tool of a technocracy. Nor is it a doe-eyed view that AI will bring us a nirvana where the robots do all the work. Through story telling, simple-to-understand frameworks, and thoughtful proposals, this is a book about how how AI can expand the pie - if we engage and pay attention. It is about how we can use AI to feed a world and make healthcare accessible to all - if we engage and pay attention. And about how AI can bring new jobs that add new value while closing existing gaps...if we engage and pay attention. He has guidance for those who are building AI, those who are using AI, and those who are regulating AI. And, if you happen to be looking for a beautifully accessible way of understand what AI is and how it works, that alone makes this a wonderful read. I'll be thinking about this one for some time.
resing's review against another edition
2.0
There are some great nuggets hidden in here. Overall, I have a hard time recommending this book when there are better books out there covering these topics.
On the surface, a book about AI and rural America from Kevin Scott sounds great. However, I really struggled to read it.
If you're interested in what Microsoft's doing to help people, I have two better recommendations.
1) Hit Refresh - Satya Nadella
2) Tools and Weapons - Brad Smith
If you've already read those two, you might pick up a few new things from Kevin Scott's book. If not, start there.
On the surface, a book about AI and rural America from Kevin Scott sounds great. However, I really struggled to read it.
If you're interested in what Microsoft's doing to help people, I have two better recommendations.
1) Hit Refresh - Satya Nadella
2) Tools and Weapons - Brad Smith
If you've already read those two, you might pick up a few new things from Kevin Scott's book. If not, start there.
hundred's review against another edition
2.0
Oof - I wanted to like this book. I love Kevin Scott, he's an amazing engineer and clearly has his heart in the right place, but it's hard to recommend this book.
Quick Summary:
- Scott is currently the CTO of Microsoft. He was previously the CTO of LinkedIn, led engineering teams at Google, and founded AdMob, he's objectively a badass.
- He grew up in rural Virginia and is a bit of an outlier in his journey to great success in Silicon Valley.
- He is concerned about the growing geographic (and racial - to a lesser extent) opportunity gap due to economic changes (movement of jobs to the coast, centralization of agriculture, etc).
- He believes AI is going to create opportunity and is working to a) educate folks about the opportunity of AI (as an antidote to anti-AI folks e.g. Elon Musk), and b) to create opportunity in rural areas.
The Good:
- Interesting personal story about his journey from rural upbringing, through university, PhD, and into Silicon Valley.
- Great penultimate chapter (Politics and Ethics) - in which Scott discusses what he sees as the principle roles in the future of AI and the responsibilities of each of those roles.
The Bad:
- Each chapter is too broad - Scott jumps from discussing how technology is being used in farms, to the politics of 5G deployment in Washington, to what types of work AI can replace, to what services cloud providers can offer, all in a single chapter, though he has separate chapters ostensibly covering each of these sections. It just bounces around a bit too much without following a clean thread. I could probably switch the titles on the chapters and it would read similarly.
- Because it's so broad, it is repetitive. The stuff he covers about what types of work AI will replace in the farm chapter, he recovers in the chapter about the type of work AI can replace, and again in the chapter about the future of AI.
- Dude's an engineer - there is sooooooo much detail in some of the encounters in the book it can be painful. He describes the ads he's seeing on the TV for a whole page in one chapter. Scott clearly did a ton of research for this, and it he's included every meeting and all the backstory of each one.
Overall - great ideas from a great and caring man, but I'd have preferred each idea to be sharpened and packaged in a much more succinct format (blog post perhaps - coalesced into a book?) before I'd recommend it to a friend.
Quick Summary:
- Scott is currently the CTO of Microsoft. He was previously the CTO of LinkedIn, led engineering teams at Google, and founded AdMob, he's objectively a badass.
- He grew up in rural Virginia and is a bit of an outlier in his journey to great success in Silicon Valley.
- He is concerned about the growing geographic (and racial - to a lesser extent) opportunity gap due to economic changes (movement of jobs to the coast, centralization of agriculture, etc).
- He believes AI is going to create opportunity and is working to a) educate folks about the opportunity of AI (as an antidote to anti-AI folks e.g. Elon Musk), and b) to create opportunity in rural areas.
The Good:
- Interesting personal story about his journey from rural upbringing, through university, PhD, and into Silicon Valley.
- Great penultimate chapter (Politics and Ethics) - in which Scott discusses what he sees as the principle roles in the future of AI and the responsibilities of each of those roles.
The Bad:
- Each chapter is too broad - Scott jumps from discussing how technology is being used in farms, to the politics of 5G deployment in Washington, to what types of work AI can replace, to what services cloud providers can offer, all in a single chapter, though he has separate chapters ostensibly covering each of these sections. It just bounces around a bit too much without following a clean thread. I could probably switch the titles on the chapters and it would read similarly.
- Because it's so broad, it is repetitive. The stuff he covers about what types of work AI will replace in the farm chapter, he recovers in the chapter about the type of work AI can replace, and again in the chapter about the future of AI.
- Dude's an engineer - there is sooooooo much detail in some of the encounters in the book it can be painful. He describes the ads he's seeing on the TV for a whole page in one chapter. Scott clearly did a ton of research for this, and it he's included every meeting and all the backstory of each one.
Overall - great ideas from a great and caring man, but I'd have preferred each idea to be sharpened and packaged in a much more succinct format (blog post perhaps - coalesced into a book?) before I'd recommend it to a friend.
jakew's review against another edition
2.5
2.5/5
Serves as a good introduction to AI and its effects on the workforce, mostly on the optimistic end of the spectrum. I would characterize the writing as even handed and well informed. At times it read as a sponsored article from Microsoft, but I suppose that is unsurprising coming from the current CTO. It was more memoir than I had expected, which were my favorite parts, as I have heard many of the topics on AI from other sources already.
Serves as a good introduction to AI and its effects on the workforce, mostly on the optimistic end of the spectrum. I would characterize the writing as even handed and well informed. At times it read as a sponsored article from Microsoft, but I suppose that is unsurprising coming from the current CTO. It was more memoir than I had expected, which were my favorite parts, as I have heard many of the topics on AI from other sources already.
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