If a week is a long time in politics, a year is an eternity in tech. Just over 12 months ago, the industry was humming along in its usual way. The big platforms were deep into what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification" – the process in which platforms go from being initially good to their users, to abusing them to make things better for their business customers and finally to abusing those customers in order to claw back all the value for themselves. Elon Musk was ramping up his efforts to alienate advertisers on Twitter/X and accelerate the death spiral of his expensive toy. TikTok was monopolising every waking hour of teenagers.

Artificial general Intelligence (AGI) researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky says AI innovation is far worse than the nuclear bomb and could lead to the death of everyone on earth. But that may not be entirely accurate, according to some of his peers, who believe the risks are overstated. Yudkowsky spoke in the wake of an open letter signed recently by several luminaries including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, billionaire Elon Musk, Gary Marcus, and others, calling for a six-month moratorium on large language AI training in the world. "If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter," he warned, in a recent article published by the Time Magazine. Also read: Trouble in ChatGPT Paradise?

Kissinger, former Secretary of State in the Nixon & Ford administrations; Schmidt, former CEO of Google; Huttenlocher, an acclaimed computer vision research who is currently a dean at MIT's Schwarzman College of Computing. Why it's good: The book's trio of authors brings their expertise in statecraft, business, and academia to explore how AI is set to reshape society. "AI's promise of epoch-making transformations--in society, economics, politics, and foreign policy--portends effects beyond the scope of any single author's or field's traditional focuses," the authors contend in an online preview of the book. In the time since The Age of A.I. was published, a revolution in generative AI has brought us much closer to the promise of artificial general intelligence -- the representation of human cognitive abilities in software-- making the book's discussion of how society will change as machines increasingly perform human tasks all the more relevant.

By Latha Srinivasan: There are many lessons to be learnt from the ideology of our Sanskrit epics, say scholars. The contribution of the Bhagavad Gita to management principles is well-documented today. Now, there is a train of thought that believes the Mahabharata can teach us how to manage machine autonomy and Artificial Intelligence (AI). While experts believe that AI will improve human effectiveness, capacities, and open a world of vast opportunities, it also presents us with unprecedented threats. So how does the Mahabharata help us in this context?

This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit our collection to discover "The Economist reads" guides, guest essays and more seasonal distractions. IN RECENT years artificial intelligence (AI) has undergone a revolution. After decades of modest progress that never quite lived up to its promise, a different approach--relying on big data and stats, not clever algorithms--made huge strides in solving real-world problems like voice- and image-recognition and self-driving cars. Also in the past ten years, a lot of books have been published that aim to explain what AI is, where it's going and why it matters.

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This article appears in the November/December 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. The term "artificial intelligence" is widely recognized by researchers as less a technically precise descriptor than an aspirational project that comprises a growing collection of data-centric technologies. The recent AI trend kicked off around 2010, when a combination of increased computing power and massive troves of web data reanimated interest in decades-old techniques. It wasn't the algorithms that were new as much as the concentrated resources and the surveillance business models capable of collecting, storing, and processing previously unfathomable amounts of data. In other words, so-called "advances" in AI celebrated over the last decade are primarily the product of significantly concentrated data and computing resources that reside in the hands of a few large tech corporations like Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

This article appears in the November/December 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. The term "artificial intelligence" is widely recognized by researchers as less a technically precise descriptor than an aspirational project that comprises a growing collection of data-centric technologies. The recent AI trend kicked off around 2010, when a combination of increased computing power and massive troves of web data reanimated interest in decades-old techniques. It wasn't the algorithms that were new as much as the concentrated resources and the surveillance business models capable of collecting, storing, and processing previously unfathomable amounts of data. In other words, so-called "advances" in AI celebrated over the last decade are primarily the product of significantly concentrated data and computing resources that reside in the hands of a few large tech corporations like Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

At the age of 98, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has a whole new area of interest: artificial intelligence. He became intrigued after being persuaded by Eric Schmidt, who was then the executive chairman of Google, to attend a lecture on the topic while at the Bilderberg conference in 2016. The two have teamed up with the dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, Daniel Huttenlocher, to write a bracing new book, The Age of AI, about the implications of the rapid rise and deployment of artificial intelligence, which they say "augurs a revolution in human affairs." The book argues that artificial intelligence processes have become so powerful, so seamlessly enmeshed in human affairs, and so unpredictable, that without some forethought and management, the kind of "epoch-making transformations" they will deliver may send human history in a dangerous direction. Kissinger and Schmidt sat down with TIME to talk about the future they envision. Kissinger: When I was an undergraduate, I wrote my undergraduate thesis of 300 pages--which was banned after that ever to be permitted--called "The Meaning of History."

For years now, artificial intelligence has been hailed as both a savior and a destroyer. The technology really can make our lives easier, letting us summon our phones with a "Hey, Siri" and (more importantly) assisting doctors on the operating table. But as any science-fiction reader knows, AI is not an unmitigated good: It can be prone to the same racial biases as humans are, and, as is the case with self-driving cars, it can be forced to make murky split-second decisions that determine who lives and who dies. Like it or not, AI is only going to become an even more omnipresent force: We're in a "watershed moment" for the technology, says Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO. Schmidt is a longtime fixture in a tech industry that seems to constantly be in a state of upheaval. He was the first software manager at Sun Microsystems, in the 1980s, and the CEO of the former software giant Novell in the '90s. He joined Google as CEO in 2001, then was the company's executive chairman from 2011 until 2017. Since leaving Google, Schmidt has made AI his focus: In 2018, he wrote in The Atlantic about the need to prepare for the AI boom, along with his co-authors Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, and the MIT dean Daniel Huttenlocher. The trio have followed up that story with The Age of AI, a book about how AI will transform how we experience the world, coming out in November.