Mitchell Reiss has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Is this what it felt like in the months before August 1914? Or during the years leading up to September 1939? The discussion around artificial intelligence produces a deep foreboding that we are in the grip of forces largely beyond our control. Are we sleepwalking towards disaster?
That is the feeling I have after reading Genesis, a collaboration by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, and Henry Kissinger, who died, aged 100, soon after completing this book. They have crafted a holistic analysis of the social, political, psychological and even spiritual impacts that a superior machine intelligence would have for humanity.
We are broadly familiar with AI’s current and future benefits. These machine tools can process massive amounts of data at unnerving speeds. They can select their own goals, learn from their errors, upgrade their algorithms and design things that no human has ever previously imagined. Some experts predict the machines may soon achieve sentience, demonstrating the elements of human consciousness: memory, imagination and self-awareness.
We already see AI’s impact across business and in medicine, especially with cancer screenings, drug development and clinical trials. AI is performing human tasks, such as booking holidays, deciding mortgage eligibility and helping determine criminal justice decisions. Enthusiastic techno-optimists gush that it may even help find solutions for intractable global problems such as climate change, the transition to clean energy, global poverty and conflict between nations.
While the three authors celebrate these developments, they emphasise that there is no instruction manual telling us how to develop AI safely – one that ensures that it serves humanity and does not subordinate it.
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