Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI

by John Brockman (Editor)

Overview

Science world luminary John Brockman assembles twenty-five of the most important scientific minds, people who have been thinking about the field artificial intelligence for most of their careers, for an unparalleled round-table examination about mind, thinking, intelligence and what it means to be human.

"Artificial intelligence is today's story--the story behind all other stories. It is the Second Coming and the Apocalypse at the same time: Good AI versus evil AI." --John Brockman

More than sixty years ago, mathematician-philosopher Norbert Wiener published a book on the place of machines in society that ended with a warning: "we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.... The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door."

In the wake of advances in unsupervised, self-improving machine learning, a small but influential community of thinkers is considering Wiener's words again. In Possible Minds, John Brockman gathers their disparate visions of where AI might be taking us.

The fruit of the long history of Brockman's profound engagement with the most important scientific minds who have been thinking about AI--from Alison Gopnik and David Deutsch to Frank Wilczek and Stephen Wolfram--Possible Minds is an ideal introduction to the landscape of crucial issues AI presents. The collision between opposing perspectives is salutary and exhilarating; some of these figures, such as computer scientist Stuart Russell, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, and physicist Max Tegmark, are deeply concerned with the threat of AI, including the existential one, while others, notably robotics entrepreneur Rodney Brooks, philosopher Daniel Dennett, and bestselling author Steven Pinker, have a very different view. Serious, searching and authoritative, Possible Minds lays out the intellectual landscape of one of the most important topics of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525557999
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/19/2019
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	145,300
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

John Brockman is a cultural impresario whose career has encompassed the avant-garde art world, science, books, software, and the Internet. The founder and publisher of the online salon Edge (www.edge.org), he is the editor of the Edge Question book series, which includes This Idea is Brilliant, Know This, This Idea Must Die, This Explains Everything, This Will Make You Smarter, and other volumes. Among his books as author are The Third Culture and By the Late John Brockman. He is the founder of the international literary and software agency Brockman, Inc. and lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: On The Promise And Peril Of Al By John Brockman xv

Chapter 1 Seth Lloyd: Wrong, but More Relevant Than Ever 1

Chapter 2 Judea Pearl: The Limitations of Opaque Learning Machines 13

Chapter 3 Stuart Russell: The Purpose Put into the Machine 20

Chapter 4 George Dyson: The Third Law 33

Chapter 5 Daniel G. Dennett: What Can We Do? 41

Chapter 6 Rodney Brooks: The Inhuman Mess Our Machines Have Gotten Us Into 54

Chapter 7 Frank Wilczek: The Unity of Intelligence 64

Chapter 8 Max Tegmark: Let's Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete 76

Chapter 9 Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages 88

Chapter 10 Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas 100

Chapter 11 David Deutsch: Beyond Reward and Punishment 113

Chapter 12 Tom Griffiths: The Artificial Use of Human Beings 125

Chapter 13 Anca Dragan: Putting the Human into the AI Equation 134

Chapter 14 Chris Anderson: Gradient Descent 143

Chapter 15 David Kaiser: "Information" for Wiener, for Shannon, and for Us 151

Chapter 16 Neil Gershenfeld: Scaling 160

Chapter 17 W. Daniel Hillis: The First Machine Intelligences 170

Chapter 18 Venki Ramakrishnan: Will Computers Become Our Overlords? 181

Chapter 19 Alex "Sandy" Pentland: The Human Strategy 192

Chapter 20 Hans Ulrich Obrist: Making the Invisible Visible: Art Meets AI 206

Chapter 21 Alison Gopnik: Als Versus Four-Year-Olds 219

Chapter 22 Peter Galison: Algorists Dream of Objectivity 231

Chapter 23 George M. Church: The Rights of Machines 240

Chapter 24 Caroline A. Jones: The Artistic Use of Cybernetic Beings 254

Chapter 25 Stephen Wolfram: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Civilization 266

Index 285

Editorial Reviews

10/15/2018
Brockman (This Idea Is Brilliant, editor), founder of the literary agency Brockman Inc., devotes this entry into his series of science-oriented essay anthologies to exploring the frontiers of artificial intelligence. The 25 contributors come from a wide range of disciplines and include philosopher Daniel Dennett, psychology professor Alison Gopnik, and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn. While the authors disagree on the answers, they agree on the major question: what dangers might AI present to humankind? Within that framework, the essays offer a host of novel ideas. Several argue that AI has already become a hallmark of human culture, with genetics researcher George M. Church provocatively suggesting that modern, technology-using humans, when compared with Stone Age cultures, are already “transhumans.” Other essays underscore the necessity for ensuring that advanced AI acts in alignment with human values, while science historian George Dyson explores the difficulties inherent in controlling the technology, ending with the unsettling observation that “provably ‘good’ AI is a myth.” Readers will appreciate that the discussion is accompanied by intriguing explanations of AI development strategies, among them “deep learning,” generative adversarial networks, and inverse-reinforcement learning. The combination of theory and practice makes for enlightening, entertaining, and exciting reading. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

A fascinating map of AI’s likely future and an overview of the difficult choices that will shape it. . . . A sense of respect for the human mind and humility about its limitations runs through the essays in Possible Minds.” —Foreign Affairs
 
“Pithy essays on artificial intelligence. . . . Readers . . . will not find a better introduction than this book.” —Kirkus

“While the [Possible Minds] authors disagree on the answers, they agree on the major question: what dangers might AI present to humankind? Within that framework, the essays offer a host of novel ideas. . . . Enlightening, entertaining, and exciting reading.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2018-11-11

Pithy essays on artificial intelligence.

Since the 1990s, cultural impresario Brockman (This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know, 2018, etc.) has regularly asked prominent thinkers to address important issues. Since he is also the founder and publisher of edge.org and one of the nation's leading science literary agents, they are not inclined to refuse, so the result has been a long series of collections of thoughtful discourses on a single theme. At roughly seven to 15 pages apiece, these are not the usual Brockman tidbits but weighty disquisitions, most of which examine an aspect of AI that has received attention from numerous editors, including Brockman himself. Most contributors nod respectfully to Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), whose seminal 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings, announced that vastly advanced technology was imminent and essential for human welfare and that its major risk was that powerful men might use it as a tool of oppression. Writing before the digital revolution, he failed to predict that the technology itself (AI), not malevolent humans, might be the primary preoccupation. Max Tegmark, Frank Wilczek, and Stuart Russell worry that a superintelligent machine will share one of the primary goals of humans—self-preservation—disable its "off" switch, and look after its own interests. Optimists like Steven Pinker or David Deutsch emphasize that spectacular advances in computer power are the result of, as Pinker writes, "brute force power of faster chips and Bigger Data….Each system is an idiot savant, with little ability to leap to problems it was not set up to solve and a brittle mastery of those it was." Other contributors include George Dyson, Alison Gopnik, and Daniel Dennett.

The question "will AI be beneficent or disastrous?" is approaching the status of a dead horse, but that hasn't prevented observers from whacking away at it. Readers who want to join the fun will not find a better introduction than this book.

Kirkus Reviews

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