Computer Science
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How to Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed (Audio Download): Richard Susskind, Richard Susskind, Highbridge Audio: Amazon.co.uk: Audible Books & Originals
Revealing the unfolding story of Artificial Intelligence, Richard Susskind presents a short non-technical guide that challenges us to think differently about AI. Susskind brings AI out of computing laboratories, big tech companies, and start-ups—and into everyday life.
In recent years, and certainly since the launch of ChatGPT, there has been massive public and professional interest in Artificial Intelligence. But people are confused about what AI is, what it can and cannot do, what is yet to come, and whether AI is good or bad for humanity and civilization—whether it will provide solutions to mankinds major challenges or become our gravest existential threat. There is also confusion about how we should regulate AI and where we should draw moral boundaries on its use.
In How To Think About AI, Richard Susskind draws on his experience of working on AI since the early 1980s. For Susskind, balancing the benefits and threats of artificial intelligence is the defining challenge of our age. He explores the history of AI and possible scenarios for its future. His views on AI are not always conventional. He positions ChatGPT and generative AI as no more than the latest chapter in the ongoing story of AI and claims we are still at the foothills of developments. He argues that to think responsibly about the impact of AI requires us to look well beyond today’s technologies, suggesting that not-yet-invented technologies will have far greater impact on us in the 2030s than the tools we have today. This leads Susskind to discuss the possibility of conscious machines, magnificent new AI-enabled virtual worlds, and the impact of AI on the evolution of biological humans.
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The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025
An inside view of the AI revolution, from the people and companies making it happen.How did we build large language models? How do they think, if they think? What will the world look like if we have billions of AIs that are as smart as humans, or even smarter?
In a series of in-depth interviews with leading AI researchers and company founders—including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, MIRI cofounder Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—Dwarkesh Patel provides the first comprehensive and contemporary portrait of the technology that is transforming our world.
Drawn from his interviews on the Dwarkesh Podcast, these curated excerpts range from the technical details of how LLMs work to the possibility of an AI takeover or explosive economic growth. Patel’s conversations cut through the noise to explore the topics most compelling to those at the forefront of the field: the power of scaling, the potential for misalignment, the sheer input required for AGI, and the economic and social ramifications of superintelligence.
The book is also a standalone introduction to the technology. It includes over 170 definitions and visualizations, explanations of technical points made by guests, classic essays on the theme from other writers, and unpublished interviews with Open Philanthropy research analyst Ajeya Cotra and Anthropic cofounder Jared Kaplan.
The Scaling Era offers readers unprecedented insight into a transformative moment in the development of AI—and a vision of what comes next.
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£17.10£23.70The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025
£17.10£23.70
