Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies eBook: Nick Bostrom: Amazon.it: Kindle Store

Prof. Bostrom has written a book that I believe will become a classic within that subarea of Artificial Intelligence (AI) concerned with the existential dangers that could threaten humanity as the result of the development of artificial forms of intelligence. What fascinated me is that Bostrom has approached the existential danger of AI from a perspective that, although I am an AI professor, I had never really examined in any detail. When I was a graduate student in the early 80s, studying for my PhD in AI, I came upon comments made in the 1960s (by AI leaders such as Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy) in which they mused that, if an artificially intelligent entity could improve its own design, then that improved version could generate an even better design, and so on, resulting in a kind of "chain-reaction explosion" of ever-increasing intelligence, until this entity would have achieved "superintelligence". This chain-reaction problem is the one that Bostrom focusses on. He sees three main paths to superintelligence: 1. The AI path -- In this path, all current (and future) AI technologies, such as machine learning, Bayesian networks, artificial neural networks, evolutionary programming, etc. are applied to bring about a superintelligence.