Artificial Philosophy

Brought to you by Penguin. The most surprising thriller of the year Who would you trust with the future? The year is 2050. In the teeth of a climate catastrophe, the world is left with a drastic solution: one global leader to steer it through the coming apocalypse. The final two candidates are...

Futurists insist that AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted human mind. What hope do we have against superintelligent machines? But we aren't really on the path to developing intelligent machines. In fact, we don't even know where that path might be. Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to show how far we are from superintelligence and what it would take to get there.  

In the virtual city of Alegria, fantasies are made real, innumerable lifetimes are lived, and even death itself is a survivable experience. An escape from reality that changed the landscape of artificial intelligence, it is home to more than one hundred million people. Though it’s been six years since Alegria’s creator—revolutionary tech genius KC Kim—died of cancer, his legacy is alive in the pinnacle of KC’s genius: an AI named Allen who surges with KC’s memories.

What do you believe, and why? For more than 2,600 years, human beings have asked the questions that refuse to disappear: - What is real? - What can we know? - What is justice? - How should we live? - Does life have meaning? - Can machines think? And what happens when societies stop examining...

This book presents a timely and significant addition to the ongoing discourse around the ethical implications of AI in general, as well as the new and disruptive AI technologies, such as generative AI platforms like ChatGPT.