Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Introduction -The Dawn of AI as a Consumer Product -- AI Shakes Up Entertainment -- Predictive AI: An Extraordinary Claim That Requires Extraordinary Evidence -- Painting AI with a Single Brush Is Tempting but Flawed -- A Series of Curious --Circumstances Led to This Book -- The AI Hype Vortex --What Is AI Snake Oil? -- Who This Book Is For -- 2. How Predictive AI Goes Wrong -- Predictive AI Makes Life-Altering Decisions -- A Good Prediction Is Not a Good Decision -- Opaque AI Incentivizes Gaming -- Overautomation -- Predictions about the Wrong People -- Predictive AI Exacerbates Existing --inequalities -- A World without Prediction -- Concluding Thoughts -- 3. Why Can’t AI Predict the Future? -- A Brief History of Predicting the Future -- Using Computers -- Getting Specific -- The Fragile Families Challenge -- Why Did the Fragile Families Challenge End in Disappointment? -- Predictions in Criminal Justice -- Failure Is Hard. What about Success? -- The Meme Lottery -- From Individuals to Aggregates -- Recap: Reasons for Limits to Prediction -- 4. The Long Road to Generative AI --Generative AIs Built on a Long Series of Innovations Dating Back Eighty Years -- Failure and Revival -- Training Machines to “See” -- The Technical and Cultural Significance of ImageNet -- Classifying and Generating Images -- Generative AI --Appropriates Creative Labor -- AI for Image Classification Can Quickly Become AI for Surveillance -- 5. Is Advanced AI an Existential Threat? -- What Do the Experts Think? -- The Ladder of Generality -- What Is Next on the Ladder? -- Accelerating Progress? -- A Global Ban on Powerful AI? -- A Better Approach: Defending against Specific Threats -- Concluding Thoughts -- 6. Why Can’t AI Fix Social Media? -- When Everything Is Taken Out of Context -- Cultural Incompetence -- AI Excels at Predicting … the Past -- When AI Goes Up against Human Ingenuity -- A Matter of Life and Death -- Now, Add Regulation into the Mix -- The Hard Part Is Drawing the Line -- Recap: Seven Shortcomings of AI for Content Moderation -- A Problem of Their Own Making -- The Future of Content Moderation -- 7. Why Do Myths about AI Persist? -- AI Hype Is Different from -- Previous Technology Hype -- The AI Community Has a Culture and History -- Companies Have Few Incentives for --Transparency -- The Reproducibility Crisis in AI Research -- News Media Misleads the Public -- Public Figures Spread AI Hype -- Cognitive Biases Lead Us Astray -- 8. Where Do We Go from Here? -- AI Snake Oil Is Appealing to Broken Institutions -- Embracing Randomness -- Regulation: Cutting through the False Dichotomy -- The Limits of Regulation -- AI and the Future of Work -- Growing Up with AI in Kai’s World -- Growing Up with AI in Maya’s World.