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Superintelligence : Paths, Dangers, Strategies

by Bostrom, Nick
Published by : Oxford University Press (UK) Physical details: 415 Pages 20x13 cm | PB ISBN:9780198739838. Year: 2016
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Item type Current location Collection Call number Status Date due Barcode
Books Books General Stacks Non-fiction 006.301 B741S 2016 (Browse shelf) Available 59847

Include Index and Bibliography

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains. If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence. But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed AI or otherwise to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation? This profoundly ambitious and original audiobook picks its way carefully through a vast tract of forbiddingly difficult intellectual terrain. Yet the writing is so lucid that it somehow makes it all seem easy. After an utterly engrossing journey that takes us to the frontiers of thinking about the human condition and the future of intelligent life, we find in Nick Bostrom's work nothing less than a reconceptualization of the essential task of our time.

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