Technology is putting our humanity at risk to an unprecedented degree. This book is not for engineers who write the code or the policy makers who claim they can regulate it. This is a book for you. Because, believe it or not, you are the only one that can fix it. - Mo Gawdat Including regulating our environment and economy and everything else computers currently do, and a whole lot more that we simply can’t predict, because we won’t be the ones inventing it or even making it anymore. From a brilliant mind comes a terrifying prediction' – Tim Ash, bestselling author of Unleash Your Primal Brain The answer is us: the human beings who write the code and teach AI to mimic our behaviour. Scary Smart explains how to fix the current trajectory now, to make sure that the AI of the future can preserve our species. This book offers a blueprint, pointing the way to what we can do to safeguard ourselves, those we love, and the planet itself. Mo Gawdat is the former chief business officer for Google X and has built a monumental career in the tech industry working with the biggest names to reshape and reimagine the world as we know it. From IBM to Microsoft, Mo has lived at the cutting edge of technology and has taken a strong stance that AI is a bigger threat to humanity than global warming.

Basically, Gawdat proposes that we raise AI as if it were one of our children, and hope it takes care of us as if we were it’s aging parents. Gawdat additionally asserts that quantum computing (QC) is just now coming on line and it’s already leaving classical computing (CC) in its taillights. QC is already solving problems in mere hours minutes and seconds, that it would ostensibly take CC years and even decades to churn through, even when factoring for Moors Law etc. Bias also seems apparent. Numerous comments gave me the impression that capitalism and the West in general are troubled environments that will endlessly develop AI to our peril. That may be, but it seems to widely ignore countries with other economic systems, and questionable leaders, that are investing heavily in AI systems as well for a wide range of purposes. I could imagine the AI bot literally dredged up the fist half of the book’s section from a ‘doom and gloom of AI’ search and then the other half from ‘positive online mentality’ one. Then a chapter on love which you could have put in or taken from ANY self-development book of the last 20 years. Sadly, the above is the only part of the book I found interesting. Portions of the book seem to obsess with sowing fear about the capabilities and problems of AI. The latter half suggests that all can be solved by following the golden rule, to treat others nicely and hope that future AI systems learn from us. The author often seems to anthromorphize AI into a lost child needing a guardian. Confusingly, he notes that nobody truly understands how AI works but seems to know the solution to the problem.

Children don't learn from what you say. They learn from what you do." AIs are already reading and learning from what we say and choose and do online. And what we support. Every year we create more information than we created in human history to date. So "the store of collective human knowledge is diluted by 50% each year" and altered in tone by the new data. Gawdat’s writing style is also a plus. It’s conversational, which means it’s like sitting down with a friend (albeit a very informed one) for a chat about the future. There’s no heavy academic jargon here, and I truly appreciated that. It made the reading experience fluid and engaging. I'm paraphrasing what the author has to tell us, as he knows a great deal more about AI than I do - having worked for Google and watched an army of gripping robots learning from one another how to lift children's toys. Direct quotes are in quotes.

Scary Smart will teach you how to navigate the scary and inevitable intrusion of Artificial Intelligence, with an accessible blueprint for creating a harmonious future alongside AI. From Mo Gawdat, the former Chief Business Officer at Google [X] and bestselling author of Solve for Happy.Scary Smart explores the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to upend (and perhaps even end) life as we know it. There wasn’t much depth into topics: yes AI could be good or bad and it’s there in all the cliche ways you would expect. The growth on the next chip in your phone is going to be a million times more than the computer that put people on the moon.” The answer is us. Humans design the algorithms that define the way that AI works, and the processed information reflects an imperfect world. Does that mean we are doomed? In Scary Smart , Mo Gawdat, the internationally bestselling author of Solve for Happy , draws on his considerable expertise to answer this question and to show what we can all do now to teach ourselves and our machines how to live better. With more than thirty years' experience working at the cutting-edge of technology and his former role as chief business officer of Google [X], no one is better placed than Mo Gawdat to explain how the Artificial Intelligence of the future works.