AI and Humanity: the Promise, Peril, Choices Before Us

Whenever a powerful new technology arrives, two questions follow close behind. What will it do, and who will control it? These are questions for all of humanity and they must be answered. Technologies have a finite direction, but they do not have a destiny. They open certain possibilities and make others harder, they lean toward some uses and away from others, but they do not, in the end, decide how they will be used. That decision remains, stubbornly and inescapably, ours as humans. Artificial intelligence is unusual chiefly in how fast and how broadly it is arriving. Where past technologies spread over generations, this one is reshaping work, knowledge, and communication within the span of a few years, and it is touching nearly every domain of life at once. That speed and breadth raises the stakes of getting our choices right, because we have less time to learn from our mistakes and less room to contain them. But the underlying truth has not changed. For now, and for the foreseeable future, this remains a human story. This book explores in depth these pressing issues.