Ever since Garry Kasparov lost his second chess match against IBM's Deep Blue in 1997, the writing has been on the wall for humanity. Or so some like to think. Advances in artificial intelligence will lead – by some estimates, in only a few decades – to the development of superintelligent, sentient machines. Movies from The Terminator to The Matrix have portrayed this prospect as rather undesirable. But is this anything more than yet another sci-fi "Project Fear"?

"AlphaZero crushes chess!" scream the headlinesa as the AlphaZero algorithm developed by Google and DeepMind took just four hours of playing against itself (with no human help) to defeat the reigning World Computer Champion Stockfish by 28 wins to 0 in a 100-game match. Only four hours to recreate the chess knowledge of one and a half millennium of human creativity! This followed the announcement just weeks earlier that their program AlphaGoZero had, starting from scratch, with no human inputs at all, comprehensively beaten the previous version AlphaGo, which in turn had spectacularly beaten one of the world's top Go players, Lee Seedol, 4-1 in a match in Seoul, Korea, in March 2016. Interest in AI has reached fever pitch in the popular imagination--its opportunities and its threats. The time is ripe for books on AI and what it holds for our future such as Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark, Android Dreams by Toby Walsh, and Artificial Intelligence by Melanie Mitchell.6,8,9

"Just to rub it in, a version of AlphaGO, called AlphaZero recently learned to trounce AlphaGo at Go, and also to trounce Stockfish (the world's best chess program, far better than any human) and Elmo (the world's best shongi program, also better than any human). AlphaZero did all this in one day." I was reading "Human Compatible" this week and the above anecdote got me thinking. A computer crushing Chess and Go Grandmasters is impressive and feels ominous, but what does it mean for our everyday jobs? Every year computer chips get smaller and faster (Moore's Law) and experts predict Machine Learning, AI and automation will eviscerate our jobs.

The late Stephen Hawking called artificial intelligence the biggest threat to humanity. But Hawking, albeit a revered physicist, was not a computer scientist. Elon Musk compared AI adoption to "summoning the devil." But Elon is, well, Elon. And there are dozens of movies that depict a future in which robots and artificial intelligence go berserk.

Welcome to AI book reviews, a series of posts that explore the latest literature on artificial intelligence. The late Stephen Hawking called artificial intelligence the biggest threat to humanity. But Hawking, albeit a revered physicist, was not a computer scientist. Elon Musk compared AI adoption to "summoning the devil." But Elon is, well, Elon. And there are dozens of movies that depict a future in which robots and artificial intelligence go berserk.

Sign in to report inappropriate content. In this episode of Talks at GS, computer scientist Stuart J. Russell discusses how artificial intelligence is shaping both the future of innovation and the future of work and his views on how society can adapt to those changes.

At a recent meeting of the World Economic Forum, someone asked Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, when superintelligent artificial intelligence (AI) might arrive. He loosely estimated it to be within his children's lifetime, and then he emphasized the Chatham House rules of the meeting and that his conjecture was "strictly off the record." But, he writes in his new book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, "Less than two hours later, an article appeared in the Daily Telegraph citing Professor Russell's remarks, complete with images of rampaging Terminator robots." Hyperbole by many media outlets has made it challenging for experts to talk seriously about the dangers of artificial superintelligence--a technology that would surpass the intellectual capabilities of humans. Nonetheless, many experts have written books on the subject.

Machine learning is everywhere, but is it actual intelligence? A computer scientist wrestles with the ethical questions demanded by the rise of AI. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux October 15th 2019. The idea is that unchecked robots will rise up and kill us all. But such martial bodings overlook a perhaps more threatening model: Aladdin.

Before AI can solve the world's problems, it must overcome the challenge of understanding humans--a feat we ourselves won't achieve soon.

Stuart Russell is a leading AI researcher who literally wrote (well, co-authored) the top textbook on the topic. He has also, for the last several years, been warning that his field has the potential to go catastrophically wrong. In a new book, Human Compatible, he explains how. AI systems, he notes, are evaluated by how good they are at achieving their objective: winning video games, writing humanlike text, solving puzzles. If they hit on a strategy that fits that objective, they will run with it, without explicit human instruction to do so.