This is an invaluable, clear and rather terrifying account for lay readers of the history, development and possible future of artificial intelligence
May 13, 2025 13:36
Richard Susskind’s latest book, How To Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed, offers a profound and accessible exploration of artificial intelligence, aiming to demystify AI and focus on its broader implications rather than its operational intricacies. Published in March 2025, the book is the culmination of Susskind’s extensive experience with AI, reflecting his unique perspective as an authority on legal technology and societal transformation.
Actually, I didn’t write the above paragraph. It was produced for me by the artificial intelligence app ChatGPT when I asked it to write a 600-word review of Susskind’s new book on AI, just as the JC had commissioned me to do. The rest of Chat GPT’s review is good too, although it inevitably lacks the flair and panache that JC reviewers bring to their work, or are supposed to.
Susskind’s Jewish roots are apparent from the very title of the book, echoing Maimonides’s great work, a reference perhaps lost on non-Jewish readers (Maimonides’ 12th-century book The Guide for the Perplexed explored the overlap between Aristotelianism and rabbinical thought). In true Jewish fashion AI has become a family business for the Susskinds, as the author’s sons, Daniel and Jamie, are also authorities on the subject whose books are quoted by their father.
And they’re not the only family members cited. Susskind writes about virtual reality: “We have enough tsuris (Yiddish for trouble and distress, with thanks to both my late grandmothers) in the real world without concocting imaginary universes.” As you can see from that sentence, Susskind writes with style and wit about a subject that is all around us but most of us (if I am anything to go by) cannot begin to grasp.
Susskind’s Jewish roots are apparent from the very title of the book, echoing Maimonides’s great work, a reference perhaps lost on non-Jewish readers
In today’s newspaper alone, I read about AI helping Liverpool win the Premier League title and about a WhatsApp AI feature offering “sexual roleplay scenarios” to anyone over 13.
When I visited my doctor recently, he asked me about my symptoms in the usual way. While he was taking a blood sample we chatted about family, schools, shul, and so on, before reverting to medical matters.
He then showed me that his computer had accurately recorded our conversation but edited out all non-medical material completely. He explained it was an AI app designed for doctors. I found it extraordinary.
Susskind’s book is an invaluable, clear and rather terrifying account for lay readers of the history, development and possible future of AI. Susskind has a philosophical and legal background rather than a technical one but he has been involved with AI since 1980s, first working with the legal profession on ways it could speed up its processes and more recently in a much broader way. In 2001, he helped to set up the Oxford Internet Institute (with considerable funding from the Kindertransport refugee and IT pioneer Dame Stephanie Shirley) and sees this as a model for how the best and brightest minds on the planet should work together to try to ensure that AI does not escape from our grasp.
The big problem is that it may already be too late. For Susskind says that even experts don’t know how AI works now and he professes himself increasingly concerned about the future.
There is nothing new about this: back in 1950 Alan Turing posed the question, “Can machines think?” Many experts think that we are well beyond that by now and “we’re fooling ourselves if we imagine we are still in the driving seat”, as Susskind puts it.
He himself thinks we have a decade to decide what we want and keep AI under control. Let’s hope he’s not being over-optimistic.
If that is the case and this turns out to be my last book review for the JC before AI takes over, it’s been a pleasure writing for you.
How To Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed
By Richard Susskind
Oxford University Press