Download Possible Minds TwentyFive Ways of Looking at AI John Brockman 9780525557999 Books
Download As PDF : Possible Minds TwentyFive Ways of Looking at AI John Brockman 9780525557999 Books
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.
Download Possible Minds TwentyFive Ways of Looking at AI John Brockman 9780525557999 Books
"I really enjoyed this book as well as many others from Brockman. Possible Minds provides a great background to AI at a level that everyone can understand. I recommend this book to everyone who is interested in understanding where AI is and where it might be going."
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Possible Minds TwentyFive Ways of Looking at AI John Brockman 9780525557999 Books Reviews :
Possible Minds TwentyFive Ways of Looking at AI John Brockman 9780525557999 Books Reviews
- The essays in this book make for an interesting variety of views about the future of artificial intelligence. Some are concerned about the impact of AI on our society, some quite sanguine; some skeptical about the ability of AI to reach "singularity" levels of intelligence, others arguing for AIs' civil rights. The relatively short length of each chapter means that one doesn't feel trapped in anyone's maddening world view for too long, though the closing, nihilistic contribution by Stephen Wolfram does drag on a bit. Often the interviews with people outside or on the fringes of the AI academic-industrial complex were most interesting, in particular a couple of lucid essays by artists.
For me the two stand-outs were by Jaan Tallinn, one of the creators of Skype, and Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist. Tallinn draws a powerful parallel between the slow acknowledgment of the serious risks of AI and the slow spread, in his native Estonia, of the realization that the Soviet occupation was illegitimate. Gopnik, who studies babies, offers the best explanation I've encountered of the difference between the "deep learning" connectionist implementation of AI and the Bayesian, graphical model implementation; the rest of her piece is quite interesting, too. An honorable mention to the piece by Daniel Dennett, whose contribution seems reasonable, a sign he may be mellowing as he ages.
The main drawbacks to the collection are (i) the underrepresentation of women, who contribute only 3 out of 25 pieces, and (ii) the intrusive presence of the editor, who is the opposite of self-effacing. Nonetheless, I plan to assign all or a large sampling of the book the next time I teach my college course on the social impact of robots and AI there's plenty of food for discussion.
One last reflection, though it so happened that a couple of hours after I finished reading this book, I saw the wonderful and very low-volume science fiction film "Arrival" (2016) on cable TV. In the film, a linguist (played by Amy Adams) figures out a way to communicate with a pair of cephalopod-like aliens who have visited Earth in a space vehicle with mind-boggling technology. In her last, and very poignant, conversation on their vessel, only one is present; it explains that the absent one is "undergoing the death process."
While reading the present book, it struck me that so much of AI enthusiasts' enthusiasm for uploading human minds and other ways of (purportedly) achieving immortality comes from a fear of death. I felt the movie deepened the context for this in two ways. First, the self-perpetuating cyborgs exalted by strong AI fans could wind up being rather puny, relatively speaking a sort of steampunk dream based on 21st-Century ideas about computing, something like conquering the Galaxy with autonomous coal-powered space probes. Second, and more important, the very fact of mortality may give us more kinship, and more to share with, beings from elsewhere. And that makes them much more interesting than immortal AIs could possibly be. - Research on professional AI opinion.
- I agree with Brockman that "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." In his latest book, he has assembled contributions from 25 knowledge leaders, pioneer thinkers who share their thoughts as well as (yes) their feelings about the emergence of AI, for better or worse.
A polymath himself, he asked the essayists to consider Wallace Stevens' Zen-like poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and, the parable of the blind men and an elephant. All of their essays include a "blackbird" in one form or another. Also, like the elephant, "AI is too big a topic for only one perspective, never mind the fact that no two people seem to see things the same way."
There is a farmer's market In or near the the downtown area of most major cities where a few merchants offer slices of fresh fruit as samples of their wares. In that same spirit, I now offer a selection of brief insights from eight contributors, the essence of each articulated by Brockman with precision and eloquence of the highest order
o George Dyson Any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently, while any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will be too complicated to understand.
o Daniel C. Dennett We don't need artificial agents. We need intelligent tools.
o Frank Wilczek The advantages of artificial over natural intelligence appear permanent, while the advantages of natural artificial intelligence, though substantial at present, appear transient.
o Steven Pinker There is no law of complex systems that says that intelligent agents must turn into ruthless megalomaniacs.
o Tom Griffiths Automated intellectual systems that will make good inferences about what people want must have good generative models for human behavior.
o Chris Anderson Just because AI systems sometimes end up in local minima, don't conclude that this makes them any less like life. Humans -- indeed, probably all of life forms -- are often stuck in local minima.
o Alison Gopnik Looking at what children do may give programmers useful hints about directions for computer learning.
o Caroline A. Jones The work of cybernetically inclined artists concerns the emergent behaviors of life that elude AI in its current condition.
I hasten to add that each of the other contributors -- especially John Brockman -- also could have been represented on the list of key insights. In fact, let's have him share some final thoughts "We used to think Earth was the center of the universe. Now we think we're special because we have intelligence and nothing else does. I'm afraid the bad news is that that isn't a distinction...Realizing that there isn't a genuine distance between intelligence and mere computation leads you to imagine that future -- the endpoint of our civilization as a box of a trillion souls, each of them essentially playing a video game, forever. What is the 'purpose' of that?"
What indeed.... - TestAMANt111(3)
- I'd get it if he were looking for old people working in AI, because that's a big dudefest, but scholars? Writers? Scientists from non-comp-sci fields? Come on, there's no excuse for this. This is a print manel.
- I really enjoyed this book as well as many others from Brockman. Possible Minds provides a great background to AI at a level that everyone can understand. I recommend this book to everyone who is interested in understanding where AI is and where it might be going.
- The problem with authors invited to write chapters is that necessarily they contribute whatever is on their minds rather than completed and polished publication-quality work. Most of the authors try to make a high-quality contribution; whether these contributions are useful will depend upon the particular reader.
