Vernor
Vinge had this to
say: "What is 'right' and 'wrong' in a future of
superhuman artificial intelligence? What kind of
treatment can we expect from such intelligences?
In Beyond AI, J. Storrs Hall gives us a clear
and powerful view of how both humankind and our
creations may prosper in the years to come. Highly
recommended."
|
Contents
| Background Notes | Purchase
Eric
Raymond
had this to say: ""An entertaining and very thought-provoking
ramble through the wilds of AI."
|
Beyond AI
Supplementary Info and Web Resources
I've been
studying AI since the 1970s. After working in the field
for a quarter of a century, I became interested in the
question of whether, if we really did manage to succeed,
but built a machine that only thought in a goal-directed,
rational way, wouldn't we have just succeeded in building
a (possibly superhuman) psychopath? -- and would this
really be such a smart thing to do?
This book is the result of my investigations.
It is first and foremost an attempt to give you, the reader,
a solid foundation for understanding AI in the first place
-- how far it has come, what it can do, how likely it
is to produce the kind of super-intelligent robot minds
we might reasonably worry about. Then I talk about what
what we actually know about human consciences and the
brand-new AI subfield of machine ethics. And finally I
take my best shot as predicting what AI will mean for
the human condition over the coming decades.
In fact, as I did the research and a
lot of thinking in the course of writing the book, I came
away with a different understanding of the question than
I had started with, a somewhat more optimistic one.
I wanted to write a slightly more technical book, and my editor
at Prometheus wanted a somewhat more popular book. The
result is a book which is accessible but challenging to
the intelligent general reader. It couldn't be aimed at
experts -- there are no experts in the field yet,
really, and the book covers too much ground, from cybernetics
to moral philosophy.
Ray
Kurzweil wrote: "Taking
us on an eloquent journey through an astonishingly
diverse intellectual terrain, J. Storrs Hall's 'Beyond
AI' articulates an optimistic view - in both capability
and impact - of the future of AI. This is a must
read for anyone interested in the future of the
human-machine civilization."
David
Brin wrote:The issue
is not whether we will make new creatures who are
smarter than we are. Humans have done that for ages.
BEYOND AI explores whether our new cybernetic offspring
can be taught loyalty and goodness, the way other
children have been. When it comes to machine intelligence,
J. Storrs Hall asks: "Are we smart enough to be
good ancestors?"
|
|