Three of the world’s most accomplished and deep thinkers come together to explore Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the way it is transforming human society – and what this technology means for us all. AI is coming online in searching, streaming, medicine, education, and many other fields and, in so doing, transforming how humans are experiencing reality. This book The Age of AI: And Our Human Future PDF tells about the dangers and the good sides of AI.
AI’s promise of epoch-making transformations portends effects beyond the scope of any single author’s or field’s traditional focuses. This book seeks to explain AI and provide the reader with both the questions we must face in coming years and the tools to begin answering them. What are the opportunities and challenges posed by the rise of AI? What will it mean to be human in a world dominated by machines?
This is yet another book on how to keep ever-more-powerful AI beneficial for humanity. Although it carefully and eloquently discusses many important issues, it is disappointingly lacking in concrete suggestions for what to do and not do. Instead, it’s main suggestion seems to be “just put people like us in charge and trust us – and we’ll figure it out for the rest of you”. Indeed, a key message at the end of the book is that the US should grant great power to a new national AI commission containing people just like Kissinger, Schmidt and Huttenlocher, “from the highest levels of government, business and academia”.
This is a book review rather than political commentary, so it is up to the reader rather than me to assess the wisdom of letting leaders from Google and Facebook shape our AI legislation. However, from a purely literary point of view, the irony is jarring when the book discusses the risks of big tech undermining democracy and working ever closer with government. Here is a brief summary of the book.
….George via Amazon
I quote these two passages from the book, which are spot on:
To make these abstractions more concrete, I add this horrific example of Artificial Stupidity. Engineers at Boeing created software algorithms to help prevent the new 737 MAX from stalling during flight by automatically pointing the nose down. The software was needed to counteract the tendency of the MAX aircraft’s nose to pitch upwards during certain conditions, due to more powerful jet engines. Pilots at that time did not know about the MCAS software, nor about its dependency on a single external input. If that indicator sent false signals about the angle of attack, and the MCAS software did not know about the faulty data, it did what it was designed to do—point the plane’s nose downward. This was catastrophic in two cases, resulting in crashes that killed 346 human beings
……T. Frick
Henry Kissinger served in the US Army during the Second World War and subsequently held teaching posts in history and government at Harvard University for twenty years. He served as national security advisor and secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and has advised many other American presidents on foreign policy. He received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Medal of Liberty, among other awards. He is the author of numerous books and articles on foreign policy and diplomacy, including most recently On China and World Order. He is currently chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., an international consulting firm.
Eric Schmidt is a technologist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He joined Google in 2001, helping the company grow from a Silicon Valley startup to a global technological leader. He served as chief executive officer and chairman from 2001 to 2011, and as executive chairman and technical advisor thereafter. Under his leadership, Google dramatically scaled its infrastructure and diversified its product offerings while maintaining a culture of innovation. In 2017, he co-founded Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative that bets early on exceptional people making the world better. He serves as chair of The Broad Institute, and formerly served as chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. He is the host of Reimagine with Eric Schmidt, a podcast exploring how society can build a brighter future after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Daniel Huttenlocher is the inaugural dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Previously he helped found Cornell Tech, the digital technology oriented graduate school created by Cornell University in New York City, and served as its first Dean and Vice Provost. His research and teaching have been recognized by a number of awards including ACM Fellow and CASE Professor of the Year. Huttenlocher’s main research interests are in computer vision, social media, and understanding AI. He has a mix of academic and industry background, having been a Computer Science faculty member at Cornell, researcher and manager at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and CTO of a fintech startup. He served as a member and as the chair of the board of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and currently serves as a member of the boards of Corning Inc. and Amazon.com. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, and master’s and doctorate from MIT
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