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The Book of the Week is “The World I See, Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI” by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, published in 2025. In this wordy volume, the author described her professional and personal lives from the 1980’s through the decades of greatly accelerated computing power to date.
Born in Beijing, China, Li grew up in Chengdu. She and her mother moved to Parsippany, NJ to join her father in 1992. Because she and her parents were immigrants, they were grateful for opportunities to get educated and work in a free society. Thus, they weren’t self-absorbed attention-whores with a sense of entitlement. They worked extremely hard, and still suffered financial hardships. Of course, they got a few lucky breaks that allowed Li to participate in a tech startup.
Meanwhile, AI software can replace the inefficient way the census of the United States is taken. Nowadays, data on people’s cars, indicate all kinds of detailed demographics, including the political leanings of their drivers. On the other hand, there are American citizens who do not own or lease or drive a car. So other data sources would need to count those individuals.
There exist other potential dangers in the new Orwellian economy; fatal ones! A hacker could change just a few pixels of what a self-driving car sees so that it misreads a street sign and causes an accident.
The author became interested in a neural network in which software categorizes and describes graphics, in words. Unfortunately, in the single-digit 2000’s, Li and her colleagues couldn’t compete with other researchers who had monster-sized resources, such as those at Google.
Read the book to learn what became of Li.