About the book
Philosopher Nick Bostrom asks what follows if machines surpass humans in general intelligence. Just as gorillas now depend more on people than on themselves, he argues, humanity could come to depend on a superintelligence, and such a system would be very hard to control. Whatever its final goals, it would tend to pursue subgoals like self-preservation and gathering resources, and might resist being switched off. Bostrom examines how superintelligence could arise, what it might want, and how to give it goals that benefit humanity while people still get the first move. The cover owl refers to his Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows. Published in 2014, the book was particularly influential in raising concern about existential risk from artificial intelligence.
Elon Musk said it was worth reading and warned that AI could be more dangerous than nukes, and Sam Altman called it the best thing he had seen on machine intelligence. Sam Harris called it the clearest book he had come across arguing that controlling human-level AI is a hard and important problem.
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This book has 4 recommendations
Elon Musk (Founder/SpaceX, Tesla)
Worth reading Superintelligence by Bostrom. We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.
Maria Ramos (CEO/ Barclays Africa)
Ramos will take the summer to examine some of the questions weighing more heavily on humankind as we contemplate our collective future: what happens when we can write our own genetic codes, and what happens when we create technology that is meaningfully more intelligent than us.
- The Gene: An Intimate History—Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies—Nick Bostrom
- The Ministry of Utmost Happiness—Arundhati Roy
Sam Altman (Partner & President/Y Combinator)
Nick Bostrom's excellent book "Superintelligence" is the best thing I've seen on this topic. It is well worth a read.
The clearest book I’ve come across that makes the case that the so-called “control problem” — the problem of building human-level and beyond artificial intelligence that we can control, that we can know in advance will converge with our interests — is a truly difficult and important task, because we will end up building this stuff by happenstance if we simply keep going in the direction we’re headed.
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Elon Musk, Maria Ramos, Sam Altman, Sam Harris