I’m a theologian who started out as a computer scientist. Teaching classes on AI got me wondering, not just whether we’d ever be able to create a human-like AI, but why we wanted to do so in the first place. It seemed to me that computers were the most helpful when they did the things we are not very good at—crunching big calculations, or exploring Mars—stuff we can’t do. That got me thinking that there might be something spiritual going on, that in a world where we increasingly no longer believed in God or angels, we were lonely. That we didn’t want a tool but a companion.
I wrote
The Artifice of Intelligence: Divine and Human Relationship in a Robotic Age
Who’d expect a book written almost 150 years before computers were invented to be one of the best books to help us think about AI? In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley explores how good motivations can quickly go bad.
Scientist Frankenstein builds a monster with the best of intentions yet fails to foresee what could go wrong and to take the necessary precautions when what he has produced does go wrong. Then he tries to duck responsibility, ending up futilely trying to stop things from getting worse in a desperate bid to stop a chain reaction of destruction.
Sounds like Silicon Valley? Yup. This is a cautionary tale (and not at all like the Bela Lugosi movies) for our age.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'That rare story to pass from literature into myth' The New York Times
Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley on Lake Geneva. The story of Victor Frankenstein who, obsessed with creating life itself, plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, but whose botched creature sets out to destroy his maker, would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Based on the third…
There’s a lot of fear-mongering going around regarding the possibility of a superintelligent AI that could take over or even wipe out humanity.
Larson gives a clear rationale for why this is not going to happen and further, why it is a big mistake to expect computer reasoning to be like human reasoning. He explains the ways computers think and how they differ from the ways we do.
In short, we don’t have a clue how to give computers either consciousness or common sense. Without these, worrying about superhuman intelligence is worrying about the wrong thing. There is no way a computer using current AI methods could evolve into a general intelligence.
"If you want to know about AI, read this book...It shows how a supposedly futuristic reverence for Artificial Intelligence retards progress when it denigrates our most irreplaceable resource for any future progress: our own human intelligence."-Peter Thiel
A cutting-edge AI researcher and tech entrepreneur debunks the fantasy that superintelligence is just a few clicks away-and argues that this myth is not just wrong, it's actively blocking innovation and distorting our ability to make the crucial next leap.
Futurists insist that AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted human mind. What hope do we have against superintelligent machines?…
Enter a captivating world where science fiction and thrilling suspense converge. After plummeting from the roof of Helix Unbound, Amanda awakens to a life devoid of memories. Desperately longing to fit in, yet sensing she harbors an extraordinary secret beneath her seemingly ordinary facade, she explores the unfamiliar world in…
Brevini gives us something real to worry about—climate change. Did you know that using ChatGPT to look something up can take up to ten times as much energy as doing a Google search?
To most of us, AI seems like something that just happens in thin air (the cloud). But, in reality, the data centers needed to train and run AI rely on a variety of scarce resources and eat up vast amounts of energy in doing their calculations. This little book of just 109 small pages lays out the many ways in which AI is contributing to climate change.
An AI-centric world will be a hot and stormy one, increasingly inhospitable for both humans and machines. And that has me worried.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is presented as a solution to the greatest challenges of our time, from global pandemics and chronic diseases to cybersecurity threats and the climate crisis. But AI also contributes to the climate crisis by running on technology that depletes scarce resources and by relying on data centres that demand excessive energy use.
Is AI Good for the Planet? brings the climate crisis to the centre of debates around AI, exposing its environmental costs and forcing us to reconsider our understanding of the technology. It reveals why we should no longer ignore the environmental problems generated by AI.…
Another big thing to worry about. AI doesn’t have to be superintelligent to do real damage. Scharre identifies four areas where AI will radically change the future of international politics and conflict.
As a former Army Ranger, Scharre looks first at the impact of autonomous weapons and decision-making systems, on the battlefield and behind the scenes. These will speed up the pace of warfare, perhaps beyond our human capacity to keep up and stay “in the loop.”
But Ai will also move the battlefield to the political arena, economy, and social media. In each of these, AI has the potential to really destabilize our current systems, furthering autocracy, increasing unemployment, and filling our inboxes and minds with misinformation and propaganda. I fear we might see some of Scharre’s concerns borne out in the 2024 election.
A new industrial revolution has begun. Like mechanization or electricity before it, artificial intelligence will touch every aspect of our lives-and cause profound disruptions in the balance of global power, especially among the AI superpowers: China, the United States, and Europe. Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre takes readers inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future.
Four Battlegrounds argues that four key elements define this struggle: data, computing power, talent, and institutions. Data is a vital resource like coal or oil, but it must be collected and refined. Advanced computer chips are the…
To hide a corporation’s failure to properly service a space ship, Captain Jonas Stryker is prosecuted but saved from imprisonment by a dying man, who hires Stryker to collect asteroids for their mineral content. Stryker soon finds he must stop a shadowy corporate group called The Board, who employ space…
More and more of the decisions that affect our lives are being made by AI algorithms.
These algorithms decide who gets weeded out of a stack of school or job applications, who is or is not a good candidate for parole. They mete out welfare and health insurance payments and decide who gets an operation or a transplant. While using an algorithm might seem fairer than relying on human judgment, O’Neil points out the many ways in which these algorithms embody our all too human biases and actually reinforce discrimination and undermine democracy.
An easy read, O’Neil clearly shows the dark side of big data.
'A manual for the 21st-century citizen... accessible, refreshingly critical, relevant and urgent' - Financial Times
'Fascinating and deeply disturbing' - Yuval Noah Harari, Guardian Books of the Year
In this New York Times bestseller, Cathy O'Neil, one of the first champions of algorithmic accountability, sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life -- and threaten to rip apart our social fabric.
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives - where we go to school, whether we get a loan, how much we pay for insurance - are being made…
The Artifice of Intelligence explores two questions at the heart of AI: 1) Is it possible for human beings to have an authentic relationship with an AI? and 2) How does the increasing presence of AI in our lives change the ways we relate to one another? Theologian Karl Barth suggested four criteria for an authentic relationship—look each other in the eye, speak to and hear the other, aid the other, and do it all gladly. Can AI do these things? I examine robotics, social media, warfare, consciousness, and free will, and conclude with the observation that the big thing Christianity got right is the doctrine of the incarnation. There is no authentic relationality without full embodied presence.
One summer night in a small prairie city, 18-year-old Gabriel Reece accidentally outs himself to his redneck brother Colin, flees on his motorcycle, and gets struck by lightning on his way out of town.
He’s strangely fine, walking away from his melted pile of bike without a scratch. There’s no…
Why We Hate asks why a social animal like Homo sapiens shows such hostility to fellow species members. The invasion of the Ukraine by Russia? The antisemitism found on US campuses in the last year? The answer and solution lies in the Darwinian theory of evolution through natural selection.
