Pascal Bornet

Good and controversial

Overall, I liked this book.

I bought it because I wanted a bit deeper understanding of what agentic AIs are, how they operate and where the industry is at this point and the book delivered on all 3 goals.

Of course, the subject is controversial and that's exactly how I felt listening to it. On one hand, the author does iterate that AIs are not meant to replace people, but on the other, what many examples in the book show is that replacing people was clearly the intended show more and achieved result. The book outlines best practices in implementing AIs, but would our companies follow them? Corporations have often times proven that cost saving IS their priority and if there is a way for them to save on human resources, they will do it without much care of how people feel about it.

Chapter 13 is very useful and resonated with how I see the future of the workforce. No doubt humics will become essential in the near future, but what about the people who do not have the creative spark and are currently providing for their families by doing physical, "boring" and repetitive work? I am not really sure the argument for the AIs has been won at this point.

There is also the issue with the narrator which I consider rather ethical. While I understand this book about AIs is probably the perfect one to be narrated by an AI and it showcases clearly that it can be done successfully, it also shows clearly how companies would treat the AI adoption: they will save costs, but their customers won't. And this is exactly what happened here: the book did replace the human narrator with an AI, but the price remained quite the same. So, apart from the publisher saving costs, nobody else seems to win in this situation. show less