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Book review: “Homo Deus” by Yuval Harari, (part 2 of 3)

Book review: “Homo Deus” by Yuval Harari, (part 2 of 3)

Week two: the two Singularities In the first third of his new book, Yuval Harari described how humanity escaped its perennial evils of famine, plague and war, and he claimed that we are now striving for immortality, happiness and divinity.  Now he enters the territory of the economic and the technological singularities.  Read on... Free will is an illusion Harari begins this section by attacking our strong intuitive belief that we are all unitary, self-directing persons, possessing free will. “To the best of our scientific understanding, determinism and randomness have divided the entire cake between them, leaving not even a crumb for ‘freedom’. … The...
Book review: "Homo Deus" by Yuval Harari

Book review: "Homo Deus" by Yuval Harari

Week One: ending famine, plague and war… Clear and direct Yuval Harari’s book “Sapiens” was a richly deserved success. Full of intriguing ideas which were often both original and convincing, its prose style is clear and direct – a pleasure to read.* His latest book, “Homo Deus” shares these characteristics, but personally, I found the first half dragged a little, and some of the arguments and assumptions left me unconvinced. I’m glad that I persevered, however: towards the end he produces a fascinating and important suggestion about the impact of AI on future humans. Because Harari’s writing is so crisp,...

The Reverse Luddite Fallacy

Economists can be surprisingly dangerous Most economists are convinced that automation will not lead to lasting unemployment. They point out – rightly – that it has not happened in the past. Instead, it has made products and services cheaper, which raises demand and creates new jobs. They say that the Luddites, who went round smashing weaving machines in the early nineteenth century, simply mis-understood what was happening, and this mis-understanding has become known as the Luddite Fallacy. But in the coming decades, automation may have a very different effect. Past rounds of automation replaced human and animal muscle power. That was...

Bumps on the road to the Economic Singularity (Part 3 of 3)

Peviously on this blogpost… In Part 1 we reviewed the concept of the Economic Singularity, and asked whether automation by machine intelligence will be different from previous rounds of automation.  We identified three potential dangers – one for each of the coming three decades.   In Part 2 we looked at the dangers in the 2020s and the 2030s.  For this rousing finale we look at something that could go wrong in the 2040s.  Read on... 3. The 2040s The danger: the scenario of the Gods and the Useless It is the early 2040s. For some years, most people have been unemployed,...
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Bumps on the road to the Economic Singularity (Part 2 of 3)

Peviously on this blogpost... We reviewed the concept of the Economic Singularity, and asked whether automation by machine intelligence will be different from previous rounds of automation.  We identified three potential dangers - one for each of the coming three decades.   Read on... 1. The 2020s The danger: Panic It is the mid-2020s, and self-driving vehicles (now called “autos”) are widespread. They are well on the way to being universal in commercial vehicles, including trucks, delivery vans, taxis, buses and coaches. As a result most of the five million Americans who used to drive for a living (and the three-plus million whose...

Bumps on the road to the Economic Singularity

A THREE-PART BLOGPOST PART ONE of THREE Two Singularities The term “singularity” was first applied to the impact of technology on human affairs back in the 1950s by John von Neuman, one of the founding fathers of computing. He took it from maths and physics, where it means a point at which a variable becomes infinite. The centre of a black hole is a singularity because matter becomes infinitely dense. When you reach a singularity, the normal rules break down, and the future becomes even harder to predict than usual. Since you are reading this blog, you are probably familiar...

Auto-cars Assemble!

Journalists covering the birth of the self-driving car industry are being kept very busy, and sometimes they must worry if they can keep up with all the new announcements. They haven’t even had time to pause for long enough to give the industry a proper name: “self-driving cars” is too long and too ugly. By way of giving them a helping hand, I’d like to suggest “auto-cars”. That was the name for the horseless carriage adopted by The Times of London newspaper in the late 19th century. Linguistic purists objected that it mixed Greek (auto) with Latin (car), so if...
A bet about conscious machines

A bet about conscious machines

The estimable Robin Hanson and I are reviewing each other’s books. We disagree with each other about almost everything, which is great. I admire Robin’s ability to disagree strongly without a trace of animosity. The bet arose because of the following passage in my new book, The Economic Singularity: Geoff Hinton – the man whose team won the landmark 2012 ImageNet competition – went further. In May 2015 he said that he expects machines to demonstrate common sense within a decade. (Here is a report of Hinton saying that.) Robin is famously sceptical about the rapid progress of AI, thinking...

The Economic Singularity – out now!

Artificial intelligence (AI) is overtaking our human ability to absorb and process information. Robots are becoming increasingly dextrous, flexible, and safe to be around (except the military ones).  It is our most powerful technology, and we all need to understand it. In this new book I argue that within a few decades, most humans will not be able to work for money.  Self-driving cars will probably be the canary in the coal mine, providing a wake-up call for everyone who isn’t yet paying attention. All jobs will be affected, from fast food McJobs to lawyers and journalists. This is the single most important...

Creative Capital at The Hospital

The Ludic Group runs a series of events at London's Hospital Club, and on the 4th April David Wood, chair of the London Futurists and I gave talks about some of the technologies shaping our future.  The video, just 3 mins 45 seconds, is here.

ThinkNation talk

ThinkNation is a brilliant initiative. The brainchild of Lizzie Hodgson, it is “where young people, artists and thought leaders tackle how technology is impacting everyday life and shaping our futures.” Given the profound importance of the changes sweeping through our lives in the coming years and decades, there aren't many more important subjects to address. So I was very pleased to deliver this talk (11 minutes) to an impressive group of 14-18 year-olds at a ThinkNation conference in December.  It was followed by this discussion. (20 minutes)

The Big Issue

So I am delighted that they commissioned this article about, well ... a Big Issue.  Click on the logo or the image below to go to the site and read the full article. So I am delighted that they commissioned this article about, well ... a Big Issue.  Click on the logo or the image below to go to the site and read the full article.

Letter from Utopia

When Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates talked about the promise and the peril of Artificial Intelligence last year, the media only heard the peril part. And the Terminator got a new lease of life. Since then a more balanced approach has been settling in. As a wise and sapient reader of this blog, you already know that those luminaries were prompted to comment on AI by the publication of Nick Bostrom's book “Superintelligence”. (If you haven't read it yet, you should.) Bostrom is often characterised as a doom-sayer, which he categorically is not. Although the New Year fireworks...

Mark Zuckerberg's New Year Resolution

Mark Zuckerberg’s New Year Resolution was to programme an AI to become his butler.  He was aiming at Iron Man’s faithful companion, Jarvis.  But surely he knows that Robert Downey Junior based his portrayal of Iron Man on Elon Musk? Interview with BBC Radio 5 Live.  

A dozen AI-related forecasts for 2016

An AI system devised by DeepMind will beat the best human at Go. (Rather splendidly, he is called Yoda.) SwiftKey's Neural Alpha – a keyboard for phones which uses Deep Learning to dramatically improve predictive typing - will be launched to the general public and will be big news. Virtual reality will become really quite a big thing. The existential risk organisations (FLI in Boston, FHI at Oxford, CSER at Cambridge, MIRI in California) will continue to grow resources and awareness despite a media backlash against 2015's excitement about all things AI. My book The Economic Singularity, about technological unemployment,...

Eight big (AI) announcements in 2015

1. The Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment In January, Citibank helped establish this programme, to be led by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, authors of a famous paper on AI-driven automation. The programme is monitoring changes in the labour market, and watching for signs of irreversible technological unemployment. 2. Google open-sources Tensor Flow In September, Google announced an important change in strategy. Having built a very lucrative online advertising business based on algorithms and hardware which produced better AI than anyone else, it was open sourcing its current best AI software – a deep learning engine called...

Christmas Number One

Sorry, but I couldn't resist sharing this.  "Surviving AI" is the Christmas Number One.* A very Merry Christmas to you, and a Happy New Year! * On Amazon's top 100 new releases in AI and Machine Learning.  (On Christmas Eve, anyway.)