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When AI Outsmarts IQ
Harmony
October 2008
On Sale: September 30, 2008
272 pages
ISBN: 0307405257
EAN: 9780307405258
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Will the Geeks inherit the earth?
If computers become
twice as fast and twice as capable every two years, how long
is it before they’re as intelligent as humans? More
intelligent? And then in two more years, twice as
intelligent? How long before you won’t be able to tell if
you are texting a person or an especially ingenious
chatterbot program designed to simulate intelligent human
conversation?
According to Richard Dooling in
Rapture for the Geeks—maybe not that long. It took
humans millions of years to develop opposable thumbs (which
we now use to build computers), but computers go from
megabytes to gigabytes in five years; from the invention of
the PC to the Internet in less than fifteen. At the
accelerating rate of technological development, AI should
surpass IQ in the next seven to thirty-seven years
(depending on who you ask). We are sluggish biological
sorcerers, but we’ve managed to create whiz-bang machines
that are evolving much faster than we are.
In this
fascinating, entertaining, and illuminating book, Dooling
looks at what some of the greatest minds have to say about
our role in a future in which technology rapidly leaves us
in the dust. As Dooling writes, comparing human evolution to
technological evolution is “worse than apples and oranges:
It’s appliances versus orangutans.” Is the era of
Singularity, when machines outthink humans, almost upon us?
Will we be enslaved by our supercomputer overlords, as many
a sci-fi writer has wondered? Or will humans live lives of
leisure with computers doing all the heavy lifting?
With antic wit, fearless prescience, and common
sense, Dooling provocatively examines nothing less than what
it means to be human in what he playfully calls the age of
b.s. (before Singularity)—and what life will be like when we
are no longer alone with Mother Nature at Darwin’s card
table. Are computers thinking and feeling if they can mimic
human speech and emotions? Does processing capability equal
consciousness? What happens to our quaint beliefs about God
when we’re all worshipping technology? What if the human
compulsion to create ever more capable machines ultimately
leads to our own extinction? Will human ingenuity and faith
ultimately prevail over our technological obsessions?
Dooling hopes so, and his cautionary glimpses into the
future are the best medicine to restore our humanity.
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