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Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, and today’s episode is Weekend Book Review 🎧✨
I’m settling in with a book that vibrates with the hum of the near future: Agentic AI: Theories and Practices, published by Springer Nature on 10 June 2025 in hardcover 📚🚀 This isn’t just another survey of buzzwords; it’s a field guide to the minds we’re building, the systems we’re unleashing, and the choices we’ll have to own as they begin to act, learn, and decide alongside us 🤖🧭
I like to start simple, then let the story widen. First, we meet the agents: how they were born in small programs, how they grew into autonomous collaborators, how they learned to coordinate and negotiate without getting tangled in noise or conflict 🧩 Then the tempo quickens. Tools like AutoGen, LangGraph, and CrewAI step into the light, not as gimmicks but as workbenches for real deployment, real orchestration, real outcomes 🛠️⚙️ The pace slows again as the book tests these systems in banking, insurance, healthcare, and cybersecurity, showing how agents spot fraud, manage risk, triage and diagnose, and guard the gates where humans get tired but attackers don’t 🏦🩺🛡️
Here’s where the heartbeat deepens: macroeconomics meets micro-decisions, tokens and decentralized flows crash against old business models, and the text keeps asking the questions that matter about work, equity, and governance 🌍📈 It does not blink at safety and security, either; it traces vulnerabilities, weighs the tradeoffs, and insists on guardrails before the road gets too fast to brake 🧯🔐
And at the center of this carefully built machine is the editor, Ken Huang (ed.) 💡 Ken’s the kind of builder who also drafts the blueprints for everyone else: a prolific author and practitioner who stands at the crossing of AI and Web3, shaping safety norms at the Cloud Security Alliance, contributing to OWASP’s Top 10 for LLM applications, and working with NIST’s Generative AI community to turn big ideas into usable standards 🧭📜 As CEO and Chief AI Officer of DistributedApps.ai, he writes like an engineer and curates like an ethicist, and when he speaks at places like the World Bank, IEEE, ACM, and Davos, the room tilts a little toward the practical, the testable, the now 🎙️🌐 His fingerprints are on the concepts, but his editor’s touch keeps the pages crisp, the taxonomy clean, and the argument moving.
So today, we’ll read with intention. We’ll track how multiagent coordination avoids chaos, how communication protocols carry meaning rather than noise, how evaluation moves from accuracy to alignment, and how governance frameworks keep the promise from outpacing the discipline 🧪📏 We’ll listen for the signal in robotics and gene editing, where autonomy meets the physical world, and we’ll keep asking what counts as responsibility when the system is both tool and teammate 🦾🧬
Huge thanks to editor Ken Huang and the publisher, Springer Nature, for making this work open access 🙏📖 That choice invites a wider conversation, the kind that helps researchers, engineers, CIOs, CAIOs, CTOs, analysts, and grad students build wisely instead of merely quickly.
Before we begin, hit subscribe on Spotify and the Youtube channel Weekend Researcher so the next deep dive lands right where it should 🎯🎥🎵 We’re also streaming on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcast, so pick your favorite app and join the circle 🔔📲
I’ll ask the question that will carry us through this review: if agents can now plan, coordinate, and negotiate at scale, what happens to accountability when the outcome is better than any one human could achieve, but the path there is a lattice of decisions no single mind can fully see? 🤔💭
Reference
Agentic AI. (2025). In K. Huang (Ed.), Progress in IS. Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-90026-6
Youtube channel link
https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher
