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    Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind
    Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind
    Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind
    Audiobook5 hours

    Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind

    Written by Susan Schneider

    Narrated by Kate Fenton

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    About this audiobook

    A sober-minded philosophical exploration of what AI can and cannot achieve

    Humans may not be Earth’s most intelligent species for much longer: the world champions of chess, Go, and Jeopardy! are now all AIs. Given the rapid pace of progress in AI, many predict that it could advance to human-level intelligence within the next several decades. From there, it could quickly outpace human intelligence. What do these developments mean for the future of the mind?

    In Artificial You, Susan Schneider says that it is inevitable that AI will take intelligence in new directions, but urges that it is up to us to carve out a sensible path forward. As AI technology turns inward, reshaping the brain, as well as outward, potentially creating machine minds, it is crucial to beware. Homo sapiens, as mind designers, will be playing with "tools" they do not understand how to use: the self, the mind, and consciousness. Schneider argues that an insufficient grasp of the nature of these entities could undermine the use of AI and brain enhancement technology, bringing about the demise or suffering of conscious beings. To flourish, we must grasp the philosophical issues lying beneath the algorithms.

    At the heart of her exploration is a sober-minded discussion of what AI can truly achieve: Can robots really be conscious? Can we merge with AI, as tech leaders like Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil suggest? Is the mind just a program? Examining these thorny issues, Schneider proposes ways we can test for machine consciousness, questions whether consciousness is an unavoidable byproduct of sophisticated intelligence, and considers the overall dangers of creating machine minds.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateOct 1, 2019
    ISBN9780691199092
    Author

    Susan Schneider

    Susan Schneider, a bridal magazine editor and writer, has spent the last ten or so years helping engaged women choose their dresses, their accessories, their flowers, their decor, their food and their fabulous wedding cakes for the Big Day. As the former executive editor of Modern Bride and Elegant Bride, she offers an insider's peek into the bridal business and the lives of the women who work, suffer and triumph within its tulle-lined halls. She's also been an editor and writer for a number of other major women's and parenting magazines and is the co-author of two marriage and relationship books with Dr. Sonya Rhodes. She lives in New York City.

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    • 4/5
      When it comes to the current ever-widening debate over artificial intelligence, I’m a novice. That’s why I read this book, after checking the credentials of the author professor Susan Schneider. The main focus of the book appeared to be an attempt to define the nature of human consciousness, and then dealing with the philosophical problems arising when silicon-based Big-tech artificial intelligence devices become conscious. There was much speculation in the book that took our minds into the envisioned post-human (or trans-human) future. That’s scary territory for a person like myself born & raised in the middle of the 20th century. I completed my chemical engineering degree using a slide-rule to do the calculations. Electronic calculators did not gain traction until 1969. The pace of technological change has been exponential. This book grapples with the currently unsolvable philosophical and ethical problems of the next century when ordinary humans will be a lower form of life governed by superior trans-human entities. I will not be around to experience such a world, nor will most other persons who read this. A couple of take-always from the book: I learnt in the last chapter that there is such an institution as the World Trans-humanist Society founded by Silicon Valley artificial intelligence researchers in 1998. This got me thinking about another “trans” agenda, this being the extraordinary exponential rise of the trans-gender movement that American investigator Jennifer Bilek believes is financed and promoted by these same Silicon Valley trans-humanists. It’s an attack on “biological essentialism” . If ordinary humans can have their brains scrambled to accept or believe that a man can become a woman through advanced technology, they’ve been softened up to accept and believe in trans-humanism.