Murray Shanahan

Shanahan's book is more of birds eye view on the upcoming AI wave and yet quite informative . I like this fact instead of the whole prediction game as of when AI will become self aware aka " Ray Kurzweil futurism " ; we rather tackle the problem at a philosophical level .The book does get slightly technical around full brain simulation AI in the middle but overall is well suited for the layman.

Overall the subject is very pertinent given that we are already seen the first disruptive wave of AI in self driving cars to robo-lawyers posing a threat to current socio-economic models ; the next wave be it 20 years from now will change humanity as we know it from Trans-humans to AI bots given human rights !

Nevertheless all current economic / financial models will be redundant once a super intelligent singularity becomes self aware , whether it leads to a dystopia or utopia is anyones guess for now .… (more)

A relatively simple ("foundational") and very well-written treatment of the idea that artificial general intelligence will advance first to the human-equivalent level (possibly starting with the approach of whole brain emulation, which could constitute a kind of mind uploading) and then to levels of exponentially self-improving superintelligence, perhaps accompanied by the advent of transhumanism. New to me was the notion that transhumanism could be a necessary strategy for trying to keep up with superintelligent AI, in case the latter should become hostile to humanity. The book says far too little, I think, about the fact that the development of these technologies so far (smartphones, the internet-of-things concept, cloud computing, etc) has involved a wholesale and relentless obliteration of personal privacy, and that this trend shows no signs of changing. Would an uploaded mind be afforded any privacy at all?… (more)