This essay first appeared in Recode in December 2017. "Sometimes a type of glory lights up the mind of a man," writes John Steinbeck in his novel East of Eden, which is set in a California valley -- Salinas, though, not Silicon. "It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. Okay, but what does that have to do with artificial intelligence? I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. That line finds an echo in our times. Various ethicists are writing, these days, about the concerns that AI might eliminate some things "we hold good" -- and not just meaning "jobs." They write, for example, about the threat of "moral de-skilling" in the age of algorithmic decision-making. About what might be lost or diminished by the advent of robot caretakers. About what role humans will play, in general, in an age of machine learning and neural networks making so many of the decisions that shape human lives. "It is true," Steinbeck writes, A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. We are in the process of shifting from the kind of mass production that Steinbeck talked about to a kind of mass production that requires much less human involvement. If "mass method" was bound to get into our thinking back then, how is it shaping our thinking now? Is this what the current focus on data collection and analysis of patterns is about? "In our time," adds Steinbeck, This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. In our own time, AI is spreading into all the various spheres of our lives, and there is tension and great concern about its impact. We are confused by dueling claims that AI will eliminate jobs or create new ones; that it will eliminate bias or perpetuate it and make it harder to identify; that it will lead us to longer, happier lives -- or to extinction. "At such a time," writes Steinbeck's narrator, "it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions.

While we hope it will not be lethal, the increasing use of artificial intelligenceArtificial Intelligence knows many different definitions, but in general it can be defined as a machine completing complex tasks intelligently, meaning that it mirrors human intelligence and evolves with time. in the legal services industry poses its own challenges. Law firms accustomed to using lawyers to perform certain tasks are now encountering technology, including artificial intelligence, that can perform tasks in seconds or minutes rather than the hours spent by a human counterpart. Although there are a growing number of firms using alternative fee arrangements, the majority of law firms continue to rely upon the billable hour as the source of their revenues. As technology and artificial intelligence continue to improve and threaten the traditional revenue model, law firms must assess how to use these technologies and consider other means of billing. What exactly is artificial intelligence?

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive intelligence is being used to transform cyber security and aid security analysts' identity threats more accurately. This is word from global firm IBM, which released results this week from an online survey of 150 federal IT managers familiar with their department's current cyber security capabilities and future strategies. Titled "The Federal Cyber AI IQ Test," the survey found that federal IT managers see cyber security as the single biggest opportunity for AI in the federal government. "Only 21% say they are'very comfortable' with the idea of using AI for cyber security today. Feds are roughly split regarding the ideal adoption pace for AI - 46% want to be first, 48% are afraid to take the risk. "Meanwhile 90% of Feds say AI could help prepare agencies for real-world cyber-attack scenarios and 87% say it would improve the efficiency of the federal cyber security workforce.

Technologists across the world have frantically embarked on the quest to create a new species in our own image -- general artificial intelligence with superior computational brain power. But we are only just beginning to understand the foundations of human intelligence and consciousness that cannot be captured in an algorithmic formula divorced from the functions of the body and the long evolution of our species and its microbiome. As the celebrated neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues in a WorldPost interview based on his new book, "The Strange Order of Things," it is the feelings and emotions, which originated and dwell in that biological terrain, that are constitutive of human intelligence, consciousness and the capacity for cultural creation. In short, a map of the computational mind is not the territory of what it means to be human. "Our minds operate in two registers," Damasio explains.

Artificial intelligence is pretty good at performing tasks like driving cars, translating languages, and identifying faces. The next step is getting A.I. to react to the world with intuitive knowledge. A new article published in A.I. trade publication Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery finds that instead of slogging through data sets carefully labeled to teach A.I. about the world, A.I. is starting to understand the world like people do. Research at Facebook and elsewhere opens the door for A.I. that is more intuitive, which Yann LeCun, director of A.I. research at Facebook, says is the key to improving artificial intelligence. The next level of A.I. will learn by observing, similar to how an infant learns.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who was in India for The Economic Times Global Business Summit, told reporters that he doesn't believe artificial intelligence (AI) will end up taking away people's jobs. Speaking to The Economic Times, the 67-year-old Wozniak said that over a period of time, people end up losing jobs because of phenomena like stock market crashes and market bubbles. "These things come and go. But it's not like the world is ruined," he said. Woz, the nickname by which he is widely known, pointed out that no machine ever sits down and says "Humm, what should I work on?"

In 1959, John McCarthy noted that while interesting work was being done to solve problems requiring a high level of human intelligence, many simpler verbal reasoning processes had not yet been implemented using machines. Taking inspiration from the field of formal logic which dates back to Aristotle (384–322 BC), McCarthy sought to design a machine with "common sense". He proposed a program, named the Advice Taker, that could draw conclusions and improve from a set of premises ("advice") defined in a formal language. Unlike previous research on the subject [1], McCarthy wished to describe the program's procedures and heuristics in rich detail. The motivation behind this approach was to create a machine with the ability to learn from experience as effectively as humans do and enable discovery of abstract concepts through relatively simple representations.

We explored that topic this week with Rafael Reif, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, following the announcement of the MIT Intelligence Quest, an effort to "discover the foundations of human intelligence" to develop better technology, especially artificial intelligence. Reif has been MIT's president since 2012. An electrical engineer by training, he has been outspoken in his defense of funding for basic scientific research. He was in Seattle this week to talk with alumni about MIT's plans for the future of education, research, and innovation. We spoke about all of those topics, plus diversity in the tech industry and Boston's bid for Amazon HQ2, on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast. Listen to our full conversation in the player below, and continue reading for edited excerpts. Subscribe to the GeekWire Podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

Robot Revolution: Is AI plus Human Intelligence the Future of Work?

And pretty soon, they'll come for us. That seems to be the story today, whether from Hollywood or in breathless articles in popular tech magazines about artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. In a world where machines can learn, once humans push the "on" button, there's no stopping our robot overlords, right? When machines become more intelligent, humans are freed to become more creative. That opens doors to completely new possibilities.