AI: 5 Books on Artificial Intelligence You Must Read

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hotly debated topic lately. ChatGPT is a big trend, with more and more people trying out its features. It’s unbelievable how fast, accurate and results AI works. A rationally thinking person will immediately think of questions such as what can artificial intelligence do? Will he replace us one day? Should we be worried about our jobs? We were looking for an answer to not only these questions. We bring you recommendations for books that deal with the issue and will allow us to better understand what awaits us in the future and what to prepare for.

Daniel Susskind: World without work

New technologies have always provoked panic about workers being replaced by machines. In the past, such fears have been misplaced, and many economists maintain that they remain so today. Yet in A World Without Work, Daniel Susskind shows why this time really is different. Advances in artificial intelligence mean that all kinds of tasks – from diagnosing illnesses to drafting contracts – are increasingly within the reach of computers. The threat of technological unemployment is real. So how can we all thrive in a world with less work? Susskind reminds us that technological progress could bring about unprecedented prosperity, solving one of mankind’s oldest problems: how to ensure everyone has enough to live on. The challenge will be to distribute this prosperity fairly, constrain the power of Big Tech, and provide meaning in a world where work is no longer the centre of our lives. In this visionary, pragmatic and ultimately hopeful book, Susskind shows us the way.

Cade Metz: Genius Makers

Long dismissed as a technology of the distant future, artificial intelligence was a project once consigned to the fringes of the scientific community. Then two researchers changed everything. One was a 64-year-old computer science professor with a back problem so severe he could not drive or fly. The other was a 36-year-old neuroscientist and chess prodigy. Though they took very different paths, together they helped catapult AI to the forefront of our daily lives and, in the process, created a business worth billions. This is the story of that technological revolution and of the arms race it has sparked among companies that range from Google to Facebook to OpenAI. It’s the story of growing international rivalry to achieve major new breakthroughs. And it’s a story that shows both the inventive best of humankind and its darker side, as advances have been counter-balanced by issues of prejudice, bias and the invasion of privacy.

Hubert Dreyfus: What Computers Still Can’t Do

When it was first published in 1972, Hubert Dreyfus’s manifesto on the inherent inability of disembodied machines to mimic higher mental functions caused an uproar in the artificial intelligence community. The world has changed since then. Today it is clear that “good old-fashioned AI,” based on the idea of using symbolic representations to produce general intelligence, is in decline (although several believers still pursue its pot of gold), and the focus of the Al community has shifted to more complex models of the mind. It has also become more common for AI researchers to seek out and study philosophy. For this edition of his now classic book, Dreyfus has added a lengthy new introduction outlining these changes and assessing the paradigms of connectionism and neural networks that have transformed the field.At a time when researchers were proposing grand plans for general problem solvers and automatic translation machines, Dreyfus predicted that they would fail because their conception of mental functioning was naive, and he suggested that they would do well to acquaint themselves with modern philosophical approaches to human beings.

Briana Christiana: The Alignment Problem

Artificial intelligence is rapidly dominating every aspect of our modern lives influencing the news we consume, whether we get a mortgage, and even which friends wish us happy birthday. But as algorithms make ever more decisions on our behalf, how do we ensure they do what we want? And fairly? This conundrum – dubbed ‘The Alignment Problem’ by experts – is the subject of this timely and important book. From the AI program which cheats at computer games to the sexist algorithm behind Google Translate, bestselling author Brian Christian explains how, as AI develops, we rapidly approach a collision between artificial intelligence and ethics. If we stand by, we face a future with unregulated algorithms that propagate our biases – and worse – violate our most sacred values. Urgent and fascinating, this is an accessible primer to the most important issue facing AI researchers today.

Kazuo Ishiguro: Klara and the Sun

Ishigura’s novel Klara and the Sun is the confession of a discarded robot named Klara, gifted with advanced artificial intelligence and remarkable powers of observation. Klara’s job is to take care of the teenage child who chose her in the store to the best of her knowledge and conscience. However, as an exceptional robot, Klára is given an exceptional task – to take care of a seriously ill child whose illness has no cure. In a story told in a language marked by peculiarities in Klara’s perception and expression of reality, Ishiguro once again confirms his literary mastery. In lucidly simple words, he creates an insidiously complex picture of present rather than future humanity. Klara appears as a product of a civilization in which ordinary, technologically unimproved human life increasingly resembles the past, which will soon be definitively overcome, or a regrettable mistake. Thanks to the subtlety with which Ishiguro draws the reader into Klara’s efforts to understand how people actually work, the novel goes beyond mere social criticism, satire or allegory. Similar to Ishiguro’s earlier prose Don’t Leave Me, his new novel also belongs to the science fiction genre, but it is far more reminiscent of the tragicomic, the melancholy fairy tale. A fairy tale about a human world dependent on an inhuman Sun, in whose changing light adults often seem more childish than children and robots more human than people.

Source: Martinus.cz