PUBLIC Journal, and History of Meteorology, and he has published several chapters in edited volumes on the role of statistics and science in shaping social thought. His previous book is a well-acclaimed history of the pioneering nineteenth-century statistician Adolphe Quetelet.
Donnelly applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Descent of Artificial Intelligence: A Deep History of an Idea 400 Years in the Making, and reported the following:
Page 99 actually starts with the conclusion to chapter 3, which itself is the end of the first section of the book. It summarizes the opinions of a bunch of thinkers who despised the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and who generally go by the title of the “counter-Enlightenment,” a term popularized by Isaiah Berlin. While many historians of ideas have justifiably marginalized them as reactionary thinkers tied to hidebound traditions of the old regime, I argue that their critiques of science, and particularly scientific thinking, have value today. In many ways, I argue that they actually sound like modern humanities professors who want to keep alive a vision of the liberal arts in a world of technical and career education. While a lot of people today – myself included – would certainly not support their belief in the ideas of absolute monarchy, strict adherence to the Catholic church, and traditional social hierarchies, they viewed these institutions as protectors of a kind of connected society that I think many people, including liberals, still value. Here is one quote from the page that kind of sums up what the chapter is about: “As the review of these thinkers makes clear, their fear of a 'descent' from an intelligent nature was based on the idea that the reduction of humanity to generalized laws and mathematical formula had severe consequences.”Learn more about The Descent of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Pittsburgh Press website.
I would say the Page 99 Test works great for my book. As the quote above shows, it even has “descent” and “intelligence” from the title of the book! While the book stretches from Descartes to Alan Turing and modern statistics, I think you can get a pretty good insight into what the book is about just based on this page: that artificial intelligence today is in part a product of how we have defined ourselves as scientific subjects. The thinkers in this chapter offer a critique of this process, but sometimes the critics are the best historical guide to what is going on in the history of ideas. While landing on a “Conclusion” subsection is fortuitous, I do think I benefited from academic readers reminding me to always connect the story back to the major themes of the book. Outside of a page from the introduction and conclusion to the book itself, page 99 of the book is about as good a “shortcut” as a reader would be able to find from just one page.
--Marshal Zeringue
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