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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: On the Promise and Peril of AI
by John Brockman
Artificial intelligence is today’s story—the story behind all other stories. It is the Second Coming and the Apocalypse at the same time: Good AI versus evil AI. This book comes out of an ongoing conversation with a number of important thinkers, both in the world of AI and beyond it, about what AI is and what it means. Called the Deep Thinking Project, this conversation began in earnest in September 2016, in a meeting at the Mayflower Grace Hotel in Washington, Connecticut with some of the book’s contributors.

What quickly emerged from that first meeting is that the excitement and fear in the wider culture surrounding AI now has an analogue in the way Norbert Wiener’s ideas regarding “cybernetics” worked their way through the culture, particularly in the 1960’s, as artists began to incorporate thinking about new technologies into their work. I witnessed the impact of those ideas at close hand; indeed it’s not too much to say they set me off on my life’s path. With the advent of the digital era beginning in the early 1970s, people stopped talking about Wiener, but today, his Cybernetic Idea has been so widely adopted that it’s internalized to the point where it no longer needs a name. It’s everywhere, it’s in the air, and it’s a fitting a place to begin.

Seth Lloyd: Wrong, but More Relevant Than Ever
It is exactly in the extension of the cybernetic idea to human beings that Wiener’s conceptions missed their target.

Judea Pearl: The Limitations of Opaque Learning Machines
Deep learning has its own dynamics, it does its own repair and its own optimization, and it gives you the right results most of the time. But when it doesn’t, you don’t have a clue about what went wrong and what should be fixed.

Stuart Russell: The Purpose Put Into the Machine
We may face the prospect of superintelligent machines—their actions by definition unpredictable by us and their imperfectly specified objectives conflicting with our own—whose motivation to preserve their existence in order to achieve those objectives may be insuperable.

George Dyson: The Third Law
Any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently, while any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will be too complicated to understand.

Daniel C. Dennett: What Can We Do?
We don’t need artificial conscious agents. We need intelligent tools.

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