Steven Poole

Could AI enslave humanity before it destroys it entirely?

Machines now save us from countless tedious tasks — but what if, owing to a catastrophic misunderstanding, they could never be stopped?

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  • Human Compatibile: AI and the Problem of Control

    Stuart Russell

    Allen Lane, pp. 338, £25

  • The AI Does Not Hate You: Superintelligence, Rationality and the Race to Save the World

    Tom Chivers

    Weidenfeld, pp. 304, £16

Depending on how you count, we are in the midst of the second or third AI hype-bubble since the 1960s, but the absolute current state of the art in machine cognition is still just about being better than humans at playing chess or being about as good as human beings at analysing some medical scans.

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