When Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, wrote his book The Human Use of Human Beings in 1950, vacuum tubes were still the primary electronic building blocks, and there were only a few actual computers in operation. But he imagined the future we now contend with in impressive detail and with few clear mistakes. More than any other early philosopher of artificial intelligence, he recognized that AI would not just imitate--and replace--human beings in many intelligent activities but would change human beings in the process. "We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water," he wrote. "We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves."

When Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, wrote his book The Human Use of Human Beings in 1950, vacuum tubes were still the primary electronic building blocks, and there were only a few actual computers in operation. But he imagined the future we now contend with in impressive detail and with few clear mistakes. More than any other early philosopher of artificial intelligence, he recognized that AI would not just imitate--and replace--human beings in many intelligent activities but change human beings in the process. "We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water," he wrote. "We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves."

John Brockman: On the Promise and Peril of AI • Seth Lloyd: Wrong, but More Relevant Than Ever • Judea Pearl: The Limitations of Opaque Learning Machines • Stuart Russell: The Purpose Put Into the Machine • George Dyson: The Third Law • Daniel C. Dennett: What Can We Do? • Rodney Brooks: The Inhuman Mess Our Machines Have Gotten Us Into • Frank Wilczek: The Unity of Intelligence • Max Tegmark: Let's Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete • Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages • Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas • David Deutsch: Beyond Reward and Punishment • Tom Griffiths: The Artificial Use of Human Beings • Anca Dragan: Putting the Human into the AI Equation • Chris Anderson: Gradient Descent • David Kaiser: "Information" for Wiener, for Shannon, and for Us • Neil Gershenfeld: Scaling • W. Daniel Hillis: The First Machine Intelligences • Venki Ramakrishnan: Will Computers Become Our Overlords?