The Age of AI: And Our Human Future

by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Daniel Huttenlocher

Overview

Three of the world’s most accomplished and deep thinkers come together to explore Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the way it is transforming human society—and what this technology means for us all.

Generative AI is filling the internet with false information. Artists, writers, and many other professionals are in fear of their jobs. AI is discovering new medicines, running military drones, and transforming the world around us—yet we do not understand the decisions it makes, and we don’t know how to control them.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316273992
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	11/01/2022
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	25,955
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 5.40(h) x 0.80(d)

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. Until his passing in 2023, he was 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.

Table of Contents

Preface 3

Chapter 1 Where We Are 7

Chapter 2 How We Got Here: Technology and Human Thought 29

Chapter 3 From Turing to Today-and Beyond 55

Chapter 4 Global Network Platforms 93

Chapter 5 Security and World Order 135

Chapter 6 AI and Human Identity 177

Chapter 7 AI and the Future 203

Afterword: A New Reality 229

Acknowledgments 239

Notes 241

Index 253

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher

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