Arvind Narayanan
About Arvind Narayanan
Speech topics
The Reproducibility Crisis in Machine Learning-based Science
Speaking videos
Media coverage
Decoding the Hype About AI
In 2019, Arvind Narayanan gave a talk at MIT called “How to recognize AI snake oil” that laid out a taxonomy of AI from legitimate to dubious. To his surprise, his obscure academic talk went viral, and his slide deck was downloaded tens of thousands of times; his accompanying tweets were viewed more than two million times.
Books by Arvind Narayanan
“AI Snake Oil” (2024)
From two of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI, what you need to know about AI—and how to defend yourself against bogus AI claims and products Confused about AI and worried about what it means for your future and the future of the world? You’re not alone. AI is everywhere—and few things are surrounded by so much hype, misinformation, and misunderstanding. In AI Snake Oil, computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor cut through the confusion to give you an essential understanding of how AI works and why it often doesn’t, where it might be useful or harmful, and when you should suspect that companies are using AI hype to sell AI snake oil—products that don’t work, and probably never will. While acknowledging the potential of some AI, such as ChatGPT, AI Snake Oil uncovers rampant misleading claims about the capabilities of AI and describes the serious harms AI is already causing in how it’s being built, marketed, and used in areas such as education, medicine, hiring, banking, insurance, and criminal justice. The book explains the crucial differences between types of AI, why organizations are falling for AI snake oil, why AI can’t fix social media, why AI isn’t an existential risk, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own. The book also warns of the dangers of a world where AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies. By revealing AI’s limits and real risks, AI Snake Oil will help you make better decisions about whether and how to use AI at work and home.
“Fairness and Machine Learning” (2023)
An introduction to the intellectual foundations and practical utility of the recent work on fairness and machine learning. Fairness and Machine Learning introduces advanced undergraduate and graduate students to the intellectual foundations of this recently emergent field, drawing on a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives to identify the opportunities and hazards of automated decision-making. It surveys the risks in many applications of machine learning and provides a review of an emerging set of proposed solutions, showing how even well-intentioned applications may give rise to objectionable results. It covers the statistical and causal measures used to evaluate the fairness of machine learning models as well as the procedural and substantive aspects of decision-making that are core to debates about fairness, including a review of legal and philosophical perspectives on discrimination. This incisive textbook prepares students of machine learning to do quantitative work on fairness while reflecting critically on its foundations and its practical utility.
“Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction” (2016)
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies provides a comprehensive introduction to the revolutionary yet often misunderstood new technologies of digital currency. Whether you are a student, software developer, tech entrepreneur, or researcher in computer science, this authoritative and self-contained book tells you everything you need to know about the new global money for the Internet age. How do Bitcoin and its block chain actually work? How secure are your bitcoins? How anonymous are their users? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? These are some of the many questions this book answers. It begins by tracing the history and development of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, and then gives the conceptual and practical foundations you need to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network as well as to integrate ideas from Bitcoin into your own projects. Topics include decentralization, mining, the politics of Bitcoin, altcoins and the cryptocurrency ecosystem, the future of Bitcoin, and more.
At a glanceArvind Narayanan
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