Our Final Invention

Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

By: James Barrat

Narrated by: Gary Dana

Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

A Huffington Post Definitive Tech Book of 2013

Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the "smart" in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence.

In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI’s Holy Grail - human-level intelligence. Once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful, and more alien than we can imagine.

Through profiles of tech visionaries, industry watchdogs, and groundbreaking AI systems, Our Final Invention explores the perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? And will they allow us to?

©2013 James Barrat (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Great book, a little repetitive

The content certainly makes the case for caution, risks, benefits, and AI invention awareness. I wonder, though, if the material could still be adequately covered without the exhibited repetition.

Good but biased.

Author omits details on the NON-armageddon outcome side. Granted, the book is about Armageddon, but he should've fleshed out the opposing view.

Required reading for everyone

Wow I really enjoyed this book. While I am not a fanatic about AI in any sense I do think this book should be required reading for everyone. I work in the technology sector and we get blindingly focused on our task and don’t objectively view any negative consequences of our work. But we do implement and work within our pre described boundaries. EVERYONE is waiting and helping to speed up the introduction of AGI, and its introduction will change everything.

Fascinating - something everyone should be aware o

really interesting, written for the layman. only complaint is that it's a bit drawn out. I feel like most of the points are made if the first half of the book

Revealing

It's funny at how ideas previously relegated to 80's B movies, Chopping Mall, are now a reality. You'd think that we would have been aware of the implications and potential usage of such AI and machinery. Go figure... I enjoyed this book greatly, but it saddens me that it will be largely overlooked by the general public.

Fantastically Terrifying & Incredibly Insightful

Great overview and in some cases deep dives into AGI and ASI. The book covers quite a bit of "narrow" AI too and talks in depth about the development, the different approaches being taken, and the inherent risks in creating a machine 10,000 times smarter than us. Will they need us? Hate us? Love us? Work for us or will we just be matter for them? Its going to be a wild ride, that is for sure!

Yes There’s a Problem, No This isn’t a Description of It

Massively overstates the risk of something that would take a LOT of very specific effort to cause to happen. As if Dr. Frankenstein enlisted all the help of the Scientists and people of his region in an effort to build a murderous monster….then had to invent new tech to do it as well.
The problem is that we will put less than intelligent tech in charge of important stuff. The more important the stuff the more we better hope for Super Intelligence to save our sorry …..

A good read but...

On the dangers of AI. A good read, many ideas. The author (and everyone else on the planet) has no idea what will really happen when we invent Artificial General Intelligence, but it will happen. Worth reading as it covers about every idea possible on what could happen. Given Humanity's track record of predicting the future; what will actually happen will be none-of-the-above.

Apparently Skynet is real and it's going to take over everything

The author tells the reader multiple times that the AI are going to take over everything and destroy the earth. He has multiple interviews with futurists that all seem relatively optimistic about our future robot overlords but each vignette ends with talk of the coming disaster. I appreciate the potential for disaster. I think it is a good bit overblown, though.

I think it will be a very long time before we have anything even remotely approaching artificial general intelligence. And even if one emerges there is no reason to assume it will be high and a sociopathic manner. We have a desire not to be destroyed because of our emotional subsystem. We fear annihilation. We fear death.

Without the skewing of behavioral weighting of nodes in mind network that prioritize things like staying alive A nonhuman intelligence will not care if we want to pull the plug. It would not fear death anymore than my computer fears being turned off.

I don't think it's ethical to turn it off. I think that a sapient Computer should be afforded the rights we give to all sapient beings.

But I don't think that our robot overlords are going to be all that scary. I am much more concerned about the sociopathic humans that will be driving the smart but not yet sentient computers.

I think that if a super intelligence emerges it will probably be more of a benevolent dictator if it decides to interfere with humans and "help "them.

Good material Bad delivery

The subject topic was interesting and well thought out, but the narrator sounded like a robot himself. Maybe the producers planned it that way but over 7 hours of monotone narration is not fun.