The age of AI And our human future

Former secretary of state Kissinger (World Order), former Google CEO Schmidt (How Google Works), and MIT computer scientist Huttenlocher underwhelm in this stolid and unimaginative primer on artificial intelligence. "Every day, everywhere, A.I. is increasing in popularity," they write, and trace the philosophical and intellectual roots of artificial intelligence from its antecedents in Enlightenment thinking--intelligent machines, for example, call into question "I think therefore I am"--and the postwar technological advances driven by Alan Turing and Frank Rosenblatt, who created a "neural network" for computers in 1958. While they raise thought-provoking questions about the implications of AI on geopolitics (notably as European nations debate whether to use U.S. or Chinese platforms), their musings on the impact AI has and will have on humans' daily lives feel cursory. The authors also rely on familiar examples of AI success stories--AlphaZero, a chess-playing machine, and halicin, an AI-generated antibiotic, come up time and time again. Despite the work's brief moments of insight and the authors' bona fides, there isn't much to recommend this. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Nov.)

Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher weigh in on the robotic future. When thinking of Kissinger in the context of futurology, one might conjure the image of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove; after all, it's said that he served as the model for the character. Instead, think of the 1983 film War Games, in which young Matthew Broderick nearly touches off thermonuclear war with his computer tinkering. As that latter film showed, AI involves machines learning to think for themselves--and when they do so while lacking "preprogrammed moves, combinations, or strategies derived from human play," the machines learn by their own rules. This can be good: One AI routine that the authors discuss figured out a new pharmaceutical formula that humans might never have discovered. But there's a catch, potentially ominous: "The advent of AI obliges us to confront whether there is a form of logic that humans have not achieved or cannot achieve, exploring aspects of reality we have never known and may never directly know." The book then spins off into an area Kissinger knows best: how AI might be put to work in the realm of national and international security, developing systems that may keep us all safe--or, alternately, that "will be so responsive that adversaries may attempt to attack before the systems are operational." All this begs the need for international accords on the use of AI, and we must better understand the machines already showing the promise of outstripping some of our mental processes, an understanding that will allow us to "make peace with them and, in so doing, change the world." Some parts of this policy paper seem to be mere padding, as with the side tour into Kant's notion of the Ding an sich, but some will be of interest to students of arms control, future battlespaces, and the like. Good reading for those seeking to navigate the alt-reality world after the singularity. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.