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    Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
    Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
    Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
    Ebook345 pages6 hours

    Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

    By James Barrat

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    About this ebook

    Elon Musk named Our Final Invention one of 5 books everyone should read about the future

    A Huffington Post Definitive Tech Book of 2013

    Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the "smart" in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence.

    In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI's Holy Grail—human-level intelligence. Once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful, and more alien than we can imagine.
    Through profiles of tech visionaries, industry watchdogs, and groundbreaking AI systems, Our Final Invention explores the perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? And will they allow us to?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 1, 2013
    ISBN9781250032263
    Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
    Author

    James Barrat

    James Barrat is a documentary filmmaker who’s written and produced films for National Geographic, Discovery, PBS, and many other broadcasters in the United States and Europe. He lives near Washington, DC with his wife and two children.

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    Reviews for Our Final Invention

    4/5

    82 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This was awesome book that I really liked a lot.
    • 5/5
      This was a solid overview and critique on Ray Kurzweil.
    • 4/5
      A sobering argument about the risks of AI development, and the carastrophes likely to follow when those in control of its development are willingly blind to those risks. Published in 2013, it is slightly out of date today given how public the technology has become in the last several months. Nevertheless, this remains a compelling and important read for anyone interested in AI and wanting to gain a broad perspective on it. Written in plain language and easy to follow.
    • 5/5
      A really good book that teaches you about AI, I recommend it.
    • 5/5
      So well written and had been very researched. Easy to understand about the "world" of computers of which we are a part....and what we are teaching them! Very believable. Will make you stop & think.
    • 2/5
      Great idea, but why does it have some 300 hundred pages? It can be summarized as "Machine will be smarter than human and may not share their morality. About the rest I'm as clueless as the reader". Why making this into a whole book?
    • 4/5
      Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is not something only relegated to science fiction. It is a reality. Most people immediately think of their smartphones but what about the machinery that powers cities? Would you consider that to be a facet of AI? It could be argued that because many pieces of an electrical grid are run without human interference (or understanding as to why certain parts work the way that they do) that it is a type of AI. However, the book Our Final Invention is about what happens when AI turns from AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). At that stage, machinery becomes self-sufficient, self-aware, and self-improving. It's surpassed human intelligence and can continue to improve itself and become even more intelligent. Barrat believes that at this point the machinery which should not be compared to humans will not have "feelings" about its creators. It will wipe us out in its quest to fulfill its own goals and agendas. Replication on a global scale will occur and all matter than can be used for that purpose will be used even if that matter is humanity as a whole. There are some decidedly scary concepts housed within the pages of this book. As if to ram the point home I ran across this article today which talks about the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence and how the vast majority of the populace is completely unaware of the advances being made RIGHT NOW. Chilling, eye-opening stuff. Conspiracy theorists will be eating this book up.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      This book is about the efforts computer engineers are making to construct a computer that is as intelligent as a human being; in the view of the author, James Barrat, to do so would amount to the last invention humans would ever make, as such a computer would soon take over the world and destroy mankind. The reasoning here is that a computer that could think like a human being would follow a certain pattern of thought driven by four basic drives: efficiency, self-protection, resource acquisition, and creativity. Such a machine would predictably and ultimately find that humans needed to be eliminated, either because we are a threat to a conscious machine or we are a potential energy source for it (shades of the Matrix). There are arguments behind each of the four drives, but the arguments have a rather contrived feel to them, while the resolution to those arguments reflect a human's perception of the way a computer that thought like a human would be supposed to respond. The argument ultimately begs the question, in that it assumes a computer with artificial intelligence would think about its world in the same way as a human being, while at the same time asserting that a computer would not perceive things the way a human would. You can't have it both ways: if a computer would not perceive and think like a human being, it is inappropriate to ascribe to it the same motivations as a human - not that it wouldn't do so, but that it is not necessary that it do so. We cannot conceive of a machine's motivations because we are human, not machines; and any attempt to attribute motives (or drives, desires, intentions, etc.) to a machine by us involves imposing a human mentality to the machine.Thus, while Our Final Invention may appeal to Luddites, it's overall architectonic is not logically well-founded. There is much to be learned from this book, and Barrat in some places seems to be unbiased. On the whole, however, his true leanings are obvious: our search to make computers think better is ultimately the path to humanity's doom.One should approach this book with an open mind, in that it does have some interesting things to offer; however, ultimately, the point of the book is not proved.

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    Our Final Invention - James Barrat

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