Book by Naam, Ramez

    In this debate with his critics, including several Discovery Institute Fellows, Kurzweil defends his views and sets the stage for the central question: "What does it mean to be human?"

    We currently see no evidence of any kind indicating that extraterrestrials exist outside of our solar system. But at this moment, millions of engineers, scientists, corporations, universities and entrepreneurs are racing to create the second intelligent species right here on planet earth. And we can see the second intelligent species coming from all directions in the form of self-driving cars, automated call centers, chess-playing and Jeopardy-playing computers that beat all human players, airport kiosks, restaurant tablet systems, etc. The frightening thing is that these robots will soon be eliminating human jobs in startling numbers. The first wave of unemployed workers is likely to be a million truck drivers who are replaced by self-driving trucks. Pilots will be eliminated soon as well. Then, as new computer vision systems come online, we will see tens of millions of workers in retail stores, fast food restaurants and construction sites replaced by robots. Unless we take steps now to change the economy, we will soon have tens of millions of workers who are unemployed and seeking welfare because they will have no other choice. Marshall Brain's new book "The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches" explores how the future will unfold as the second intelligent species emerges. The book answers questions like: - How will new computer vision systems affect the job market? - How many people will become unemployed by the second intelligent species? - What will happen to millions of newly unemployed workers? - How can modern society and modern economies cope with run-away unemployment caused by robots? - What will happen when the first sentient, conscious computer appears? - What moral and ethical principles will guide the second intelligent species? - Why do we see no extraterrestrials in our universe? "The Second Intelligent Species" offers a unique and fascinating look at the future of the human race, and the choices we will need to make to avoid massive unemployment and poverty worldwide as intelligent machines start eliminating millions of jobs.

    This event—the “intelligence explosion”—will be the most important event in our history, and navigating it wisely will be the most important thing we can ever do.Luminaries from Alan Turing and I. J. Good to Bill Joy and Stephen Hawking have warned us about this. Why do I think Hawking and company are right, and what can we do about it?Facing the Intelligence Explosion is my attempt to answer these questions.

    The victory of IBM's Watson on the television quiz show Jeopardy! revealed how scientists and engineers at IBM and elsewhere are pushing the boundaries of science and technology to create machines that sense, learn, reason, and interact with people in new ways to provide insight and advice.In Smart Machines, John E. Kelly III, director of IBM Research, and Steve Hamm, a writer at IBM and a former business and technology journalist, introduce the fascinating world of "cognitive systems" to general audiences and provide a window into the future of computing. Cognitive systems promise to penetrate complexity and assist people and organizations in better decision making. They can help doctors evaluate and treat patients, augment the ways we see, anticipate major weather events, and contribute to smarter urban planning. Kelly and Hamm's comprehensive perspective describes this technology inside and out and explains how it will help us conquer the harnessing and understanding of "big data," one of the major computing challenges facing businesses and governments in the coming decades. Absorbing and impassioned, their book will inspire governments, academics, and the global tech industry to work together to power this exciting wave in innovation.

    The Singularity is triggered by the tremendous growth of human and computing intelligence that is an almost inevitable outcome of Moore's Law. Since the book's publication, the coming of the Singularity is now eagerly anticipated by many of the leading thinkers in Silicon Valley, from PayPal mastermind Peter Thiel to Google co-founder Larry Page. The formation of the Singularity University, and the huge popularity of the Singularity website kurzweilai.com, speak to the importance of this intellectual movement.But what about the average person? How will the Singularity affect our daily lives—our jobs, our families, and our wealth?Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World focuses on the implications of a future society faced with an abundance of human and artificial intelligence. James D. Miller, an economics professor and popular speaker on the Singularity, reveals how natural selection has been increasing human intelligence over the past few thousand years and speculates on how intelligence enhancements will shape civilization over the next forty years.Miller considers several possible scenarios in this coming singularity:-A merger of man and machine making society fantastically wealthy and nearly immortal-Competition with billions of cheap AIs drive human wages to almost nothing while making investors rich-Businesses rethink investment decisions to take into account an expected future period of intense creative destruction-Inequality drops worldwide as technologies mitigate the cognitive cost of living in impoverished environments-Drugs designed to fight Alzheimer's disease and keep soldiers alert on battlefields have the fortunate side effect of increasing all of their users’ IQs, which, in turn, adds a percentage points to worldwide economic growthSingularity Rising offers predictions about the economic implications for a future of widely expanding intelligence and practical career and investment advice on flourishing on the way to the Singularity.

    In fact, AI will dramatically change our entire society.You might have heard that many jobs will be replaced by automation and robots, but did you also know that at the same time a huge number of new jobs will be created by AI?This book covers many fascinating and timely topics related to artificial intelligence, including: self-driving cars, robots, chatbots, and how AI will impact the job market, business processes, and entire industries, just to name a few.This book is divided into ten chapters:Chapter I: Introduction to Artificial IntelligenceChapter II: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Many IndustriesChapter III: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Business ProcessesChapter IV: Chatbots and How They Will Change CommunicationChapter V: How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing the Job MarketChapter VI: Self-Driving Cars and How They Will Change Traffic as We Know ItChapter VII: Robots and How They Will Change Our LivesChapter VIII: Artificial Intelligence Activities of Big Technology CompaniesChapter IX: Frequently Asked Questions About Artificial Intelligence Part IChapter X: Frequently Asked Questions About Artificial Intelligence Part IITo enhance your learning experience and help make the concepts easier to understand, there are more than 85 visual presentations included throughout the book.You will learn the answers to 101 questions about artificial intelligence, and also have access to a large number of resources, ideas and tips that will help you to understand how artificial intelligence will change our lives.Who is this book for?Managers and business professionalsMarketers and influencersEntrepreneurs and startupsConsultants and coachesEducators and teachersStudents and life-long learnersAnd everyone else who is interested in our future.Are you ready to discover how artificial intelligence will impact your life This guidebook offers a multitude of tools, techniques and strategies that every business and individual can quickly apply and benefit from.

    The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful--possibly beyond our control. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on humans than on the species itself, so would the fate of humankind depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence.But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed Artificial Intelligence, to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation?

    Featuring core writings by seminal thinkers in the speculative possibilities of the posthuman condition, essays address key philosophical arguments for and against human enhancement, explore the inevitability of life extension, and consider possible solutions to the growing issues of social and ethical implications and concerns. Edited by the internationally acclaimed founders of the philosophy and social movement of transhumanism, The Transhumanist Reader is an indispensable guide to our current state of knowledge of the quest to expand the frontiers of human nature.

    But even though Moravec predicts the end of the domination by human beings, his is not a bleak vision. Far from railing against a future in which machines rule the world, Moravec embraces it, taking the startling view that intelligent robots will actually be our evolutionary heirs. Intelligent machines, which will grow from us, learn our skills, and share our goals and values, can be viewed as children of our minds. And since they are our children, we will want them to outdistance us. In fact, in a bid for immortality, many of our descendants will choose to transform into ex humans, as they upload themselves into advanced computers.This provocative new book, the highly anticipated follow-up to his bestselling volume Mind Children, charts the trajectory of robotics in breathtaking detail. A must read for artificial intelligence, technology, and computer enthusiasts, Moravec's freewheeling but informed speculations present a future far different than we ever dared imagine.

    THE LIGHTS IN THE TUNNEL employs a powerful thought experiment to explore the economy of the future. An imaginary "tunnel of lights" is used to visualize the economic implications of the new technologies that are likely to appear in the coming years and decades. The book directly challenges conventional views of the future and illuminates the danger that lies ahead if we do not plan for the impact of rapidly advancing technology. It also shows how the economic realities of the future might offer solutions to issues such as poverty and climate change.

    Digital technologies—with hardware, software, and networks at their core—will in the near future diagnose diseases more accurately than doctors can, apply enormous data sets to transform retailing, and accomplish many tasks once considered uniquely human.In The Second Machine Age MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee—two thinkers at the forefront of their field—reveal the forces driving the reinvention of our lives and our economy. As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives.Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Professions of all kinds—from lawyers to truck drivers—will be forever upended. Companies will be forced to transform or die. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar.Drawing on years of research and up-to-the-minute trends, Brynjolfsson and McAfee identify the best strategies for survival and offer a new path to prosperity. These include revamping education so that it prepares people for the next economy instead of the last one, designing new collaborations that pair brute processing power with human ingenuity, and embracing policies that make sense in a radically transformed landscape.A fundamentally optimistic book, The Second Machine Age alters how we think about issues of technological, societal, and economic progress.

    The power of an artificial intelligence (AI) comes from its intelligence, not physical strength and laser guns. Humans steer the future not because we're the strongest or the fastest but because we're the smartest. When machines become smarter than humans, we'll be handing them the steering wheel. What promises—and perils—will these powerful machines present? Stuart Armstrong’s new book navigates these questions with clarity and wit.Can we instruct AIs to steer the future as we desire? What goals should we program into them? It turns out this question is difficult to answer! Philosophers have tried for thousands of years to define an ideal world, but there remains no consensus. The prospect of goal-driven, smarter-than-human AI gives moral philosophy a new urgency. The future could be filled with joy, art, compassion, and beings living worthwhile and wonderful lives—but only if we’re able to precisely define what a "good" world is, and skilled enough to describe it perfectly to a computer program.AIs, like computers, will do what we say—which is not necessarily what we mean. Such precision requires encoding the entire system of human values for an AI: explaining them to a mind that is alien to us, defining every ambiguous term, clarifying every edge case. Moreover, our values are fragile: in some cases, if we mis-define a single piece of the puzzle—say, consciousness—we end up with roughly 0% of the value we intended to reap, instead of 99% of the value.Though an understanding of the problem is only beginning to spread, researchers from fields ranging from philosophy to computer science to economics are working together to conceive and test solutions. Are we up to the challenge?A mathematician by training, Armstrong is a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford University. His research focuses on formal decision theory, the risks and possibilities of AI, the long term potential for intelligent life (and the difficulties of predicting this), and anthropic (self-locating) probability. Armstrong wrote Smarter Than Us at the request of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a non-profit organization studying the theoretical underpinnings of artificial superintelligence.

    Norbert Wiener's classic is one in that small company. Founder of the science of cybernetics—the study of the relationship between computers and the human nervous system—Wiener was widely misunderstood as one who advocated the automation of human life. As this book reveals, his vision was much more complex and interesting. He hoped that machines would release people from relentless and repetitive drudgery in order to achieve more creative pursuits. At the same time he realized the danger of dehumanizing and displacement. His book examines the implications of cybernetics for education, law, language, science, technology, as he anticipates the enormous impact—in effect, a third industrial revolution—that the computer has had on our lives.

    It has found adherents in Silicon Valley billionaires Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis. Google has entered the picture, establishing a bio-tech subsidiary aimed at solving the problem of aging.In To Be a Machine, journalist Mark O'Connell takes a headlong dive into this burgeoning movement. He travels to the laboratories, conferences, and basements of today's foremost transhumanists, where he's presented with the staggering possibilities and moral quandaries of new technologies like mind uploading, artificial superintelligence, cryonics, and device implants.A contributor to Slate, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine, O'Connell serves as a sharp and lively guide to the outer limits of technology in the twenty first century. In investigating what it means to be a machine, he offers a surprising, singular meditation on what it means to be human."