God AI is Toby Walsh's take on where artificial intelligence is heading, and whether we should be excited or worried. Walsh is a Professor of AI at UNSW and one of the field's best-known voices, and he has written several books on the subject, including Machines Behaving Badly.
The framing is boom or doom. Walsh works through the big fears, machines that improve themselves, a possible superintelligence, the singularity, and weighs them against the hype. He is clear about the real benefits, like AI helping to discover new drugs, and the real harms, like the way it is already reshaping work. His own view is worth reading: he argues the biggest disruption will come from company decisions rather than the technology itself, and that AI will end up reflecting our own values and flaws.
A clear, level-headed guide to the most talked-about subject in tech, for readers of Max Tegmark and Yuval Noah Harari.
'If you only read one book about what happens when machines get smarter than us, make it this one.' Dr Karl Kruszelnicki
