This review by Chris Newfield has now been published in Critical AI at this link https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/article/doi/10.1215/2834703X-12096054/406212/Moral-Codes-Designing-Alternatives-to-AI; an extract is pasted in below. If your institution lacks access to Critical AI please encourage them to subscribe. If you are an independent scholar please write to criticalai@sas.rutgers.edu.
EXTRACT:
Alan Blackwell writes with a serene lucidity about computer programming and its relation to “artificial intelligence” on the basis of his forty-plus years as a practitioner in the relevant fields. His calming tone is perhaps why it took me some time to grasp that he is completely reorienting the history of programming as one that refuses AI as its culmination. This will likely be new for many contemporary programmers, and may come as a shock to nonspecialists awash in standard media accounts of the AI revolution. On the basis of an improved understanding of programming past, he proposes a new programming future designed to change everyone’s relation to information technology.
I have known Blackwell for over a decade, and did immediately spot his deep concern about a corporate-driven, tech-justified trivialization of human attention and the prospective stupefaction of our collective abilities to solve humanity’s gigantic problems. His alternative takes time…