An educating, well written and genuinely frightening book OUR FINAL INVENTION by James Barrat is the result of the research by the author into artificial intelligence and the very real dangers he perceives from our determined efforts to create it. His primary point is the very simple and you would hope obvious one is that these intelligences, if they come about, will be completely alien to anything we have experienced. They will not have had the millions of years of evolution which has encouraged co-operation and nurturing in our species, they will be blank slates on to which we pour information and the results are simply not predictable. His extensive interviews with leading scientists in the field show a remarkable lack of agreement on this, while many scientists such as Eliezer Yudkowsky agree with him others, like Ray Kurzweil, are profoundly optimistic about how AI will interact with us.

The point the pessimists make is that we do not know for sure what AIs will do and that given they may end up many times more intelligent than us we may only have one chance to find out. On that basis it behoves us to make sure that when they appear they are friendly and that the time to ensure this is fast running out. As the author points out with a quote from Yudkowsky, friendliness is essential, indifference is not enough. "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else". - Eliezer Yudkowsky, research fellow, Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

A must read book.