We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler · 13 Apr 2026 · 225pp · 76,418 words
this doesn’t matter. The entire globe has been swept up in an AI arms race. It’s a runaway escalation toward an existential threat: superintelligence—machines far smarter than any human, and perhaps, smarter than all humans combined. And, you know, like what could go wrong? Be Nice… or Else: The
The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence
by Sebastian Mallaby; · 30 Mar 2026 · 607pp · 161,998 words
it also threatened humans in the most unsettling way: by hinting that their intuitions and ideas would one day cease to matter. Another response to superintelligent machines was to keep fighting them. In game four in Korea, Lee Sedol managed a surprise upset against AlphaGo. With Move 78, a masterstroke that came
The Transhumanist Reader
by Max More and Natasha Vita-More · 4 Mar 2013 · 798pp · 240,182 words
. Both human beings and bacteria have good claims to being the “dominant species” on Earth – depending upon how one defines dominant. It is possible that superintelligent machines may wish to dominate some niche that is not presently occupied in any serious fashion by human beings. If this is the case, then from
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AI occur? I can imagine several scenarios, and I’m sure other people can imagine more. Perhaps the most important point to make is that superintelligent machines may not be competing in the same niche with human beings for resources, and would therefore have little incentive to dominate us. In such a
Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World
by Mo Gawdat · 29 Sep 2021 · 259pp · 84,261 words
it to ensure its own survival. All in all, whichever way this may go, sooner or later capital markets will be traded by a few superintelligent machines, which will be owned by a few massively wealthy individuals – people who will decide the fate of every company, shareholder and value in our human
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. These ideas aim to make sure that we will be able to make the right decisions at the right time; that we will only allow superintelligent machines into the real world when we have tested and trusted them; that we will retain the ability to only allow them a confined playground after
Architects of Intelligence
by Martin Ford · 16 Nov 2018 · 586pp · 186,548 words
AI-powered technologies such as facial recognition will impact privacy seem well-founded. Warnings that robots will soon be weaponized, or that truly intelligent (or superintelligent) machines might someday represent an existential threat to humanity, are regularly reported in the media. A number of very prominent public figures—none of whom are
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address those concerns? Is there a role for government regulation? Will AI unleash massive economic and job market disruption, or are these concerns overhyped? Could superintelligent machines someday break free of our control and pose a genuine threat? Should we worry about an AI “arms race,” or that other countries with authoritarian
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and the economy? JOSH TENENBAUM: Some of the risks that people have advertised a lot are that we’ll see some kind of singularity, or superintelligent machines that take over the world or have their own goals that are incompatible with human existence. It’s possible that could happen in the far
Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
by James Barrat · 30 Sep 2013 · 294pp · 81,292 words
in chapter 1, but it’s enough to say for now that when someone proposes Asimov’s laws as the solution to the dilemma of superintelligent machines, it means they’ve spent little time thinking or exchanging ideas about the problem. How to make friendly intelligent machines and what to fear from
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superintelligent machines has moved beyond Asimov’s tropes. Being highly capable and accomplished in AI doesn’t inoculate you from naïveté about its perils. I’m not
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to manufacture them, or even robotic bodies, vehicles, and weapons, would be elementary. The ASI could provide the blueprints for whatever it required. More likely, superintelligent machines would master highly efficient technologies we’ve only begun to explore. For example, an ASI might teach humans to create self-replicating molecular manufacturing machines
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an automobile over icy roads. So, relax, we’ll figure it out when we get there. My problem with the gradualist view is that while superintelligent machines can certainly wipe out humankind, or make us irrelevant, I think there is also plenty to fear from the AIs we will encounter on the
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interesting and sensitive time in human history. By about 2030, less than a generation from now, it could be our challenge to cohabit Earth with superintelligent machines, and to survive. AI theorists return again and again to a handful of themes, none more urgent than this one: we need a science for
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made a connection between contemporary computer clouds, like those owned by Google, Amazon, and Rackspace Inc., and the kinds of high-energy, super-cold environments superintelligent machines will need. One frigid example is Bok globules—dark clouds of dust and gas where the temperature is about 441 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, almost
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in human history—the invention of smarter-than-human machines. To paraphrase Good, if you make a superintelligent machine, it will be better than humans at everything we use our brains for, and that includes making superintelligent machines. The first machine would then set off an intelligence explosion, a rapid increase in intelligence, as
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so on—that we could only be saved by better thinking, and that would come from superintelligent machines. The second sentence lets us know that the father of the intelligence explosion concept was acutely aware that producing superintelligent machines, however necessary for our survival, could blow up in our faces. Keeping an ultraintelligent machine
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’s problems in the 1960s. And if the machine could learn, its intelligence would explode. Mankind would have to adjust to sharing the planet with superintelligent machines. In “Speculations” he wrote: The machines will create social problems, but they might also be able to solve them in addition to those that have
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than humans are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees. That’s another apt analogy—rabbits are to humans as humans will be to superintelligent machines. And how do we treat rabbits? As pests, pets, or dinner. ASI agents will be our tools at first—their ancestors Google, Siri, and Watson
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need to solve problems that are too difficult for us. Then, after he’d lived three more decades, Good changed his mind. We’ll make superintelligent machines in our image, he said, and they will destroy us. Why? For the same reason we’d never agree to a ban on AI research
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all that stretches out ahead is a perpetual AI winter. Chapter Twelve The Last Complication How can we be so confident that we will build superintelligent machines? Because the progress of neuroscience makes it clear that our wonderful minds have a physical basis, and we should have learned by now that our
The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design
by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth · 3 Oct 2019
of scientists to be seriously worried about AI risk. Most of these fears are premised on the idea that AI research will inevitably lead to superintelligent machines in a chain reaction that will happen much faster than humanity will have time to react to. This chain reaction, once it reaches some critical
The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson · 5 Apr 2021
philosopher Nick Bostrom, prominent purveyors of the myth, talk not only as if human-level AI were inevitable, but as if, soon after its arrival, superintelligent machines would leave us far behind. This book explains two important aspects of the AI myth, one scientific and one cultural. The scientific part of the
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usher in greater-than-human intelligence in an escalating process of self-modification. In ominous language, Bostrom echoes Good’s futurism about the arrival of superintelligent machines: Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of
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a particularly good System Y candidate for progress on AI toward general intelligence. THE EVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGISTS Many AI enthusiasts who hold to an inevitability thesis (superintelligent machines are coming, no matter what we do) hold to this because it plays on evolutionary themes, and thus conveniently absolves individual scientists from the responsibility
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intelligence error with his much-discussed notion of ultraintelligence, proposing that the arrival of intelligent machines necessarily implied the arrival of superintelligent machines. Once the popular imagination accepted the idea of superintelligent machines, the rewriting of human purpose, meaning, and history could be told within the parameters of computation and technology. But ultraintelligent machines
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has become, as Wiener worried, sanguinely anti-intellectual and even antihuman. The connection here to the myth is unavoidable, as mythology about the coming of superintelligent machines replacing humans makes concern over anti-intellectual and anti-human bias irrelevant. The very point of the myth is that anti-humanism is the future
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pulled such fancies even more centrally into culture, with predictably narrow but flashy application successes touted as the future, which (alas) will be dominated by superintelligent machines. The vision of artificial general intelligence here is pure mythology and window dressing. No one is likely to understand even the core problems clearly, let
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, 74; hierarchical pattern recognition theory of, 264–266; on human intelligence, 251; Law of Accelerating Returns of, 42, 47–48, 67; on singularity, 46; on superintelligent machines, 2; on Turing test, 193–194 ladder of causation, 130, 174 Lakatos, Imre, 48 Laney, Doug, 292n5 language. See natural language Lanier, Jaron, 84, 244
Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind
by Susan Schneider · 1 Oct 2019 · 331pp · 47,993 words
value them because we feel an affinity of consciousness—thus most of us recoil from killing a chimp, but not from eating an orange. If superintelligent machines are not conscious, either because it’s impossible or because they aren’t designed to be, we could be in trouble. It is important to
What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
by John Brockman · 5 Oct 2015 · 481pp · 125,946 words
superhuman intelligence will be expensive and require enormous amounts of electrical power—they’ll need to earn money to survive. The environmental playing field for superintelligent machines is already in place; in fact, the Darwinian game is afoot. The trading machines of investment banks are competing, for serious money, on the world
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for very little cost and more leisure time available to those who want it. Of course, the first superintelligent machines probably won’t be corporate; they’ll be operated by governments. And this will be much more hazardous. Governments are more flexible in their actions
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this world is the simulation to torture those who didn’t help it come into existence earlier. Maybe, if you do work on AI, our superintelligent machine overlords will be good to you. OUR MASTERS, SLAVES, OR PARTNERS? JOHN MARKOFF Senior writer, science section, New York Times; author, Machines of Loving Grace
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the universe (13.8 billion years) and even of our own solar system (4.6 billion years). As per the paradox that Fermi posed, if superintelligent machines arose elsewhere in the galaxy then they should already be here; since we don’t see them, some argue, technologically advanced life must not yet
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intelligent. Worrying about the dangers of unfriendly AI is a prime example. A preoccupation with the risks of superintelligent machines is the smart person’s Kool-Aid. This is not to say that superintelligent machines pose no danger to humanity. It’s simply that there are many other more pressing and more probable risks
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tend to argue that the other risks are already the subject of much discussion, and that even if the probability of being wiped out by superintelligent machines is low, it’s surely wise to allocate some brainpower to preventing such an event, given the existential nature of the threat. Not coincidentally, the
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Theory of Mind. I suspect the closest we can come to knowing this most complex of states is indirectly, by studying the behavior of these superintelligent machines. They will have crossed that threshold when they start replicating and looking for an energy source solely under their control. If this should occur, and
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and will be more than a tool, more than our servant. What kind of relationship might we expect? We’re hearing a lot about how superintelligent machines may spell the end of the human race—and that the future relationship between humans and AI will be a contest for domination. Another path
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far so majestic, if it weren’t for the idea that the trajectory of improvement would itself be out of our control, such that these superintelligent machines might gravitate to “goals” (metrics by which they decide what to do) that we dislike. Much work has been done on ways to avoid this
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horrifying danger—that of the extinction of everything that matters to us. But our reptilian brains also see in them the savior; we hope that superintelligent machines will offer us eternal life and youth. Intimations of these ways of thinking are embedded in our language. While in English the terms robot and
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; that’s why, even in science fiction, humans usually find unexpected ways to beat the logic of the machines. Therefore the possibility of a flawless superintelligent machine seems like science fiction: We can never condense the entire knowledge of the world, so we can’t teach a machine how to do it
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