The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity

The author is an optimist and he believes that technology advances will potentially bring a utopia. He tries to make his book understandable to a wide audience and caters to not only the scientists but also to religious and mystics. Byron demonstrates some depth of knowledge in the area of artificial intelligence. He philosophizes about the potential for and potential impact of general AI. Being a scientist, I found a lot of the theories to be irrational but I recognize that many would disagree with a scientific viewpoint. I generally liked the book but found it too accommodating to irrational points of view.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese could have been really good if only it wasn't riddled with so many grammatical errors. :'-( Repeated words, completely missing words, and words in the wrong order (was this down to the editor?) were liberally spread through the entire book which really took away from my enjoyment. I felt that what he was trying to accomplish with this book was interesting but I'm not entirely sure that he accomplished his goal (and he certainly needs to do a more thorough job of editing). This was less a purely scientific look at artificial intelligence and more a philosophical one about the nature of consciousness and if it's even remotely possible to duplicate show more it in a computer matrix. As with philosophical books, there were more questions raised than answers proposed. For all of the books on AI that I've read this one rests at the bottom and you'd be better served reading something along the lines of In Our Own Image by George Zarkadakis for a well-executed and researched work on the subject. Additionally, major points taken off for a lack of a bibliography. I have no idea how you can reference so many other people's work and then give them absolutely no credit. 2/10 show less

Áhugaverð bók þar sem Reese skoðar möguleikana á því hvað leiðir verði farnar í framtíðinni á gerfigreind og samþættingu manns og vélar. Hann tekur vel saman og fer skipulega yfir mismunandi sjónarhorn um afleiðingar aukinnar gerfigreindar. Reese segir það algerlega á hreinu að gerfigreindin muna líta dagsins ljós en hins vegar eru grilljón vandamál sem þarf að yfirstíga við útfærslu hennar sem hann fer yfir í stuttu máli.

The author review some of the central questions we face in understanding where we are going with the development of Artificial Intelligence. He reviews many developments and some persistent limitations - such as we don't understand consciousness, and can't even model the tiny brain of some tiny worms. He clarifies some of the challenges facing humanity as the age of technology goes on.

Very readable treatment of a complicated topic.

mildly interesting speculation