Shrier D.L. Welcome to AI: A Human Guide to Artificial Intelligence

Harvard Business Review Press, 2024. — 218 p.This is a fascinating guide to the rapidly advancing world of Artificial Intelligence and how this powerful technology will impact our lives, careers, and world.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is driving workforce disruption on a scale not seen since the Industrial Revolution.In schools and universities, AI technology has forced a reevaluation of the way students are taught and assessed. Meanwhile, ChatGPT has become a cultural phenomenon, reaching a hundred million users and attracting a reputed $1 trillion investor interest in its parent company, OpenAI.The race to dominate the generative AI market is accelerating at breakneck speed, inspiring breathless headlines and immense public interest.ChatGPT is a consumer-facing service that allows you to engage in conversation with an AI and have it not only give you answers to questions but create content for you. Instead of the functional but still somewhat awkward vocabulary of search engine technology, where you have to dive down a rabbit’s warren of links to extract meaning and substance, ChatGPT does the heavy lifting for you. ChatGPT can write software code or an essay in response to a prompt from a business school professor in the blink of an eye.What we came out with at the end of this condensed process was a decision to explicitly require the students to partner with their LLM buddy and tell them to write portions of the business plan. The students then engaged in critical thinking, examining the output from the LLM (usually ChatGPT, but we suggested a dozen alternatives), highlighting what it did well, and explaining what they could do differently to make the output usable in their final presentation. Tempted though we were, we did not make use of the generative AI tools for university professors that we uncovered in our research, which can make lesson plans, design assessments, and conduct an array of other tedious, time-consuming tasks associated with creating a detailed curriculum.Welcome to AI provides a rare view into a frontier area of Computer Science that will change everything about how you live and work. Read this book and better understand how to succeed in the AI-enabled future.