Speaking in Code

What This Book Covers

1. Prologue
2. Chapter One - The Thinking Machines
3. Chapter Two - From War to Logic
4. Chapter Three - The First Boom
5. Chapter Four - The First Winter
6. Chapter Five - The Revival: 1980s Expert Systems
7. Chapter Six - Moore’s Law Meets the Brain
8. Chapter Seven - Big Data Awakens
9. Chapter Eight - The Deep Learning Breakthrough
10. Chapter Nine - AlphaGo and the Age of Shock
11. Chapter Ten - GANs and Deepfakes
12. Chapter Eleven - The Silicon Wars
13. Chapter Twelve - The Language Models
14. Chapter Thirteen - Alignment and Doom
15. Chapter Fourteen - The Invisible Hand
16. Chapter Fifteen - The China Model
17. Chapter Sixteen - What Is Intelligence?
18. Chapter Seventeen - Are We Already Post-Human?

Excerpt

PROLOGUE THE FIRST TIME a machine asked, “What am I?” we didn’t even hear it. It didn’t happen with a bang or a headline. There was no red eye blinking to life. No robotic voice muttering hello, world. Just code running quietly on a server farm in a place you’ll never visit, powered by electricity you’ll never see, asking questions it was never supposed to ask. That’s the thing about artificial intelligence: it never needed our permission. We like to pretend that we’re still in charge. That this is just a tool. That we can pull the plug. But look around — have you tried living a single day without algorithms? Without search engines, recommendations, predictions, filters, automation, spam...