Book review: Uncontrollable: The Threat of Artificial Superintelligence and the Race to Save the World, by Darren McKee.

This is by far the best introduction to AI risk for people who know little about AI. It’s appropriate for a broader class of readers than most laymen-oriented books.

It was published 14 months ago. In this rapidly changing field, most AI books say something that gets discredited by the time they’re that old. I found no clear example of such obsolescence in Uncontrollable (but read on for a set of controversial examples).

Nearly everything in the book was familiar to me, yet the book prompted me to reflect better, thereby changing my mind modestly – mostly re-examining issues that I’ve been neglecting for the past few years, in light of new evidence.

The rest of this review will focus on complaints, mostly about McKee’s overconfidence. The features that I complain about reduce the value of book by maybe 10% compared to the value of an ideal book. But that ideal book doesn’t exist, and I’m not wise enough to write it.

Book review: The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma, by Mustafa Suleyman.

An author with substantial AI expertise has attempted to discuss AI in terms that the average book reader can understand.

The key message: AI is about to become possibly the most important event in human history.

Maybe 2% of readers will change their minds as a result of reading the book.

A large fraction of readers will come in expecting the book to be mostly hype. They won’t look closely enough to see why Suleyman is excited.