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A review by rick2
Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria
2.0
This is an aggregation book. Fared doesn’t say anything that’s going to shock anyone who’s been paying attention to the world. But he does a pretty good job of aggregating a lot of decent writers and thinkers on various topics. I agree with most of what he has to say. His global view of things is refreshing to someone who has been in a very US centric bubble the last year. He’s definitely not global in a robust way, but I thought his derivations into his experiences in India were some of the highlights of the book.
I think as a summary of and analysis of where the United States is at currently this is a really good book.
I thought most of his points were well founded, With the caveat that every time someone says we are “just a few years away from Artificial general intelligence” I melt a PS5 down in front of a child. We are not “just a few years away” we are probably not even several decades away. The absolute gulf of how far we are away from AGI is vast. We will continue to have super impressive feats of seeming pseudo intelligence from computers, and we will continue to say “we’re just a couple years away“ late into the second half of the century.
And I think you can draw this example into further criticism of the book in that vast majority of this future looking statements have been stolen and pretty blatantly copied from other books by People who are equally as clueless about what the future may bring. Fareed doesn’t really take any risks in this book. He has a very well educated old-school liberal approach to a lot of things. But that involves parroting whatever trendy idea is in the public ethos about things like UBI, AI, Automation, Trade, and Covid.
Worth a read if you want to refresh and distill the commonly accepted knowledge around liberal thought.
I think as a summary of and analysis of where the United States is at currently this is a really good book.
I thought most of his points were well founded, With the caveat that every time someone says we are “just a few years away from Artificial general intelligence” I melt a PS5 down in front of a child. We are not “just a few years away” we are probably not even several decades away. The absolute gulf of how far we are away from AGI is vast. We will continue to have super impressive feats of seeming pseudo intelligence from computers, and we will continue to say “we’re just a couple years away“ late into the second half of the century.
And I think you can draw this example into further criticism of the book in that vast majority of this future looking statements have been stolen and pretty blatantly copied from other books by People who are equally as clueless about what the future may bring. Fareed doesn’t really take any risks in this book. He has a very well educated old-school liberal approach to a lot of things. But that involves parroting whatever trendy idea is in the public ethos about things like UBI, AI, Automation, Trade, and Covid.
Worth a read if you want to refresh and distill the commonly accepted knowledge around liberal thought.