The Age of AI (Russian Edition): And Our Human Future

by Henry Kissinger, Daniel Huttenlocher, Eric Schmidt, Kamill Ahmetov (Translator)

Overview

In 2017, the AlphaZero neural network became the best chess player. Knowing only the rules of the game, she was able to develop a unique winning tactic in just 4 hours. Three years later, an artificial intelligence program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was able to solve a more difficult task - to develop a new kind of antibiotic, chalicin. It is able to destroy bacteria that are resistant to all other drugs. Program learning penetrates into all areas of life: it is used in the transport industry, medicine, trade, finance, law enforcement and other areas. Neural networks are capable of quickly coming up with ideas and innovations that would take humans decades, if not a lifetime, to develop. Scientists hope that thanks to AI we will be able to solve global problems: find cures for deadly diseases, cope with hunger and low levels of education in certain regions, and safely master the oceans and space. But the use of artificial intelligence can also have negative consequences, because many processes in its work remain incomprehensible to humans. The authors of this book have collected reflections on the opportunities and challenges associated with the advent of AI. They explain what radical changes can occur in our history, understanding of the world and our own role in it, and help to understand the impact of AI on the future of our society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9785206000689
Publisher:	Alpina PRO
Publication date:	05/03/2023
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	1 MB
Language:	Russian

About the Author

Henry A. Kissinger served as the 56th Secretary of State from September 1973 until January 1977. He also served as the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs from January 1969 until November 1975. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, and the Medal of Liberty in 1986. Presently, he is Chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., an international consulting firm.
 
Eric Schmidt is an accomplished technologist, entrepreneur and philanthropist. As Google’s Chief Executive Officer, he pioneered Google’s transformation from a Silicon Valley startup to a global leader in technology. He served as Google’s Chief Executive Officer and Chairman from 2001-2011, Executive Chairman from 2011-2018 and most recently as Technical Advisor from 2018-2020. Under his leadership Google dramatically scaled its infrastructure and diversified its product offerings while maintaining a strong culture of innovation. Prior to his career at Google, Eric held leadership roles at Novell and Sun Microsystems, Inc.
 
Daniel Huttenlocher is the inaugural dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Previously he served as founding Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech, the digital technology oriented graduate school created by Cornell University in New York City. He has a mix of academic and industry experience, as a Computer Science faculty member at Cornell and MIT, researcher and manager at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and CTO of a fintech startup. He currently serves as chair of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation board and as a member of the Corning Inc. and Amazon.com boards.

Editorial Reviews

07/12/2021

Former secretary of state Kissinger (World Order), former Google CEO Schmidt (How Google Works), and MIT computer scientist Huttenlocher underwhelm in this stolid and unimaginative primer on artificial intelligence. “Every day, everywhere, A.I. is increasing in popularity,” they write, and trace the philosophical and intellectual roots of artificial intelligence from its antecedents in Enlightenment thinking—intelligent machines, for example, call into question “I think therefore I am”—and the postwar technological advances driven by Alan Turing and Frank Rosenblatt, who created a “neural network” for computers in 1958. While they raise thought-provoking questions about the implications of AI on geopolitics (notably as European nations debate whether to use U.S. or Chinese platforms), their musings on the impact AI has and will have on humans’ daily lives feel cursory. The authors also rely on familiar examples of AI success stories—AlphaZero, a chess-playing machine, and halicin, an AI-generated antibiotic, come up time and time again. Despite the work’s brief moments of insight and the authors’ bona fides, there isn’t much to recommend this. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

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.

Kirkus Reviews