The Age of AI: And Our Human Future

by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Daniel Huttenlocher Narrated by Eric Pollins

Overview

Three of our most accomplished and deep thinkers come together to explore Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the way it is transforming human society-and what it means for us all.

An AI learned to win chess by making moves human grand masters had never conceived. Another AI discovered a new antibiotic by analyzing molecular properties human scientists did not understand. Now, AI-powered jets are defeating experienced human pilots in simulated dogfights. AI is coming online in searching, streaming, medicine, education, and many other fields and, in so doing, transforming how humans are experiencing reality.

In The Age of AI, three leading thinkers have come together to consider how AI will change our relationships with knowledge, politics, and the societies in which we live. The Age of AI is an essential roadmap to our present and our future, an era unlike any that has come before.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Absolutely masterful."—Fareed Zakaria, CNN/GPS

" A salutary warning to handle this technology with care and build institutions to control it...With his co-authors Mr Kissinger has...used his vast experience and versatile mind to make a muscular contribution to one of the 21st century’s most pressing debates."—The Economist

"Good reading for those seeking to navigate the alt-reality world."—Kirkus Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

2021-10-13
Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher weigh in on the robotic future.

When thinking of Kissinger in the context of futurology, one might conjure the image of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove; after all, it’s said that he served as the model for the character. Instead, think of the 1983 film War Games, in which young Matthew Broderick nearly touches off thermonuclear war with his computer tinkering. As that latter film showed, AI involves machines learning to think for themselves—and when they do so while lacking “preprogrammed moves, combinations, or strategies derived from human play,” the machines learn by their own rules. This can be good: One AI routine that the authors discuss figured out a new pharmaceutical formula that humans might never have discovered. But there’s a catch, potentially ominous: “The advent of AI obliges us to confront whether there is a form of logic that humans have not achieved or cannot achieve, exploring aspects of reality we have never known and may never directly know.” The book then spins off into an area Kissinger knows best: how AI might be put to work in the realm of national and international security, developing systems that may keep us all safe—or, alternately, that “will be so responsive that adversaries may attempt to attack before the systems are operational.” All this begs the need for international accords on the use of AI, and we must better understand the machines already showing the promise of outstripping some of our mental processes, an understanding that will allow us to “make peace with them and, in so doing, change the world.” Some parts of this policy paper seem to be mere padding, as with the side tour into Kant’s notion of the Ding an sich, but some will be of interest to students of arms control, future battlespaces, and the like.

Good reading for those seeking to navigate the alt-reality world after the singularity.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173022059
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	11/02/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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