How To Think About AI

Revealing the unfolding story of Artificial Intelligence, Richard Susskind presents a short non-technical guide that challenges us to think differently about AI. Susskind brings AI out of computing laboratories, big tech companies, and start-ups - and into everyday life. In recent years, and certainly since the launch of ChatGPT, there has been massive public and professional interest in Artificial Intelligence. But people are confused about what AI is, what it can and cannot do, what is yet to come, and whether AI is good or bad for humanity and civilisation - whether it will provide solutions to mankinds major challenges or become our gravest existential threat. There is also confusion about how we should regulate AI and where we should draw moral boundaries on its use. In How To Think About AI, Richard Susskind draws on his experience of working on AI since the early 1980s. For Susskind, balancing the benefits and threats of artificial intelligence is the defining challenge of our age. He explores the history of AI and possible scenarios for its future. His views on AI are not always conventional. He positions ChatGPT and generative AI as no more than the latest chapter in the ongoing story of AI and claims we are still at the foothills of developments. He argues that to think responsibly about the impact of AI requires us to look well beyond todays technologies, suggesting that not-yet-invented technologies will have far greater impact on us in the 2030s than the tools we have today. This leads Susskind to discuss the possibility of conscious machines, magnificent new AI-enabled virtual worlds, and the impact of AI on the evolution of biological humans.

Autorentext

Professor Richard Susskind CBE KC is Special Envoy for Justice and AI to the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. He is President of the Society for Computers and Law, and for 25 years, from 1998 to 2023, was Technology Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. The author of 11 books, his work has been translated into 16 languages and he has been invited to speak in over 50 countries. He wrote his doctorate on AI and law at Balliol College Oxford in the mid-1980s. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Zusammenfassung
Susskind tells the unfolding story of AI, explaining what it does and how it has evolved, offering unconventional views on its ups and downs. He suggests that the main error we make in thinking about AI is anthropomorphizing, that is, evaluating and discussing current and future AI systems by reference to humans.

Inhalt

• Introduction

• 1: The summer of AI

• 2: On technology

• 3: Process-thinking and outcome-thinking

• 4: Confusions

• 5: We don't have the words

• 6: Automation, innovation, elimination

• 7: Radical structural change

• 8: Harnessing AI

• 9: Coming soon

• 10: The great schism

• Conclusion