Scary Smart: Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World

As Donald Knuth put it: “Ai has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do without thinking …”

What do we have left that is ours and ours alone? Sensorimotor skills that are all but automatic, yes. Consciousness, yes. Emotions. Instinct. Appetites, impulses and dr... See more

The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism. For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the assumpt

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With the emerging ability to improve the embodied experience for all sentient beings, our species is entering a painful adolescent phase. We must realize it is no longer acceptable to coast along on values and purpose inherited from the past, without needing to exercise agency and responsibility to decide what we will work toward. We have to accept... See more