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Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence And The End Of The Human Era (2013)

by James Barrat(Favorite Author)

3.68 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0312622376 (ISBN13: 9780312622374)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Thomas Dunne Books/St Martin's Press (NY)

review 1: This is hands down the most depressing book I've ever read. James Barrat, the author of "Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era" levels some pretty serious charges against the designers and engineers of artificial intelligence in this creepy book. He believes that unstoppable artificial intelligence will in the near future commandeer the resources of our society -- possibly even the galaxy -- to perpetuate themselves at the expense of humanity, biology, even the knitting of the universe. Marshalling his evidence he speaks to some of the leaders in the artificial intelligence community and some of their harshest critics. The intelligent bots are being designed to improve their own efficiency, protect themselves from intrusion, and gather... more whatever resources they deem necessary for their autonomous growth. There is a worldwide race, Barrat writes, to ascend the heights of artificial superintelligence (ASI) to commercialize it and/or develop it for "defence" purposes. And while he fears the people who want to control it, he is more concerned that the designers are more likely to build serious flaws into it, the biggest being that they will not be "friendly" to creatures of lesser intelligence, i.e. humans. Imagine a world where your own molecules become grist for the mill. The part of this book I found most annoying was that it was pretty persuasive.
review 2: The English language has been terribly devastated and tortured by this author who should learn the distinction between written and spoken English. Contractions and colloquialisms are just everywhere. Moreover he wrote a book without having any technical knowledge about the topic.About the content... just because we discovered the electricity we didn't have Frankenstein, just because we build steam machines we didn't have a robots invasion. The same way, by using pattern prediction algorithms won't give us catastrophic super intelligence beings. less

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