Measuring the intelligence of AI is one of the trickiest but most important questions in the field of computer science. If you can't understand whether the machine you've built is cleverer today than it was yesterday, how do you know you're making progress? At first glance, this might seem like a non-issue. "Obviously AI is getting smarter" is one reply. "Just look at all the money and talent pouring into the field. Look at the milestones, like beating humans at Go, and the applications that were impossible to solve a decade ago that are commonplace today, like image recognition. How is that not progress?"

If there's anything that machine learning has taught us, it's that artificial intelligence can't write for shit--just look at this very horny, but very bad A.I. …

Robots have already replaced humans in many jobs, from manufacturing cars to filling warehouse orders and flipping burgers. But as artificial intelligence programs learn to better communicate with humans, they'll soon encroach on careers once considered untouchable, like law and accounting. These chatbots may one day even replace your doctor. This January, the United Kingdom's National Health Service launched a trial with Babylon Health, a startup developing an AI chatbot. For six months, Babylon will offer a triage service on its app as an alternative to dialing the U.K.'s 24 hour non-emergency telephone number.

Darknet is one of the most interesting and thought provoking sci fi books that I have read in awhile. As someone who is deeply immersed in the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence, I have come across or thought about many of the ideas that have been presented in this book, especially the central theme – autonomous agents that aided by our increasingly digital online worlds, become capable enough to run their own corporate entities. Technology is not quite there yet for a creation of such an agent, but it's probably much closer than most people realize. That's why it was really interesting to go through the intellectual exercise of imagining what kind of things would such an entity engage in if it comes to be. For that reason alone Darknet is very worthwhile read for all AI geeks out there.