As I said before, I’ll be posting book reviews. Please let me know if you have any questions and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability.
Book Review: The AI does not hate you by Tom Chivers
The title of this book comes from a quote by Elizier Yudkowsky which reads in full: “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms which it can use of something else”. This book covers not only potential risks from AI, but the rationalist community from which this evolved and also touches on the effective altruism movement.
This book fills something of a gap in the book market; when people are first learning about existential risks from AI I usually recommend the two-part Wait by Why post (https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html) and then I’m not really sure what to recommend next. The sequences are ridiculously long and Bostrom’s Superintelligence is a challenging read for those not steeped in philosophy and computer science. In contrast, this book is much more accessible and provides the right level of detail for a first introduction, rather than someone who has already decided to try entering the field.
I mostly listened to this book to see if I could recommend it. Most of the material was familiar, but I was also pleasantly surprised a few times to hear a new take (at least to me). It was engaging and well-written throughout. Regarding what’s covered: there’s an excellent introduction to the alignment problem; the discussion of Less Wrong mostly focuses on cognitive biases, but also covers a few other key concepts like the Map and Territory and Bayesianism; the Center for Applied Rationality is mostly reduced to just double crux; Slatestarcodex is often quoted, but not a focus; and Effective Altruism isn’t the focus, but there’s a good general introduction. I also thought he dealt well with someone of the common criticisms of the community.
Even though there are notable omissions, these are understandable given the need to keep the book to a reasonable length. And it could have been possible to more fully capture the flavour of the community, but given how hard it is to describe the essence of a community with such broad interests, I think he did an admirable job. All in all, this is an excellent introduction to the topic if you’ve been hearing about AI Safety or Less Wrong and want to dive in more
As I said before, I’ll be posting book reviews. Please let me know if you have any questions and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability.
Book Review: The AI does not hate you by Tom Chivers
The title of this book comes from a quote by Elizier Yudkowsky which reads in full: “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms which it can use of something else”. This book covers not only potential risks from AI, but the rationalist community from which this evolved and also touches on the effective altruism movement.
This book fills something of a gap in the book market; when people are first learning about existential risks from AI I usually recommend the two-part Wait by Why post (https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html) and then I’m not really sure what to recommend next. The sequences are ridiculously long and Bostrom’s Superintelligence is a challenging read for those not steeped in philosophy and computer science. In contrast, this book is much more accessible and provides the right level of detail for a first introduction, rather than someone who has already decided to try entering the field.
I mostly listened to this book to see if I could recommend it. Most of the material was familiar, but I was also pleasantly surprised a few times to hear a new take (at least to me). It was engaging and well-written throughout. Regarding what’s covered: there’s an excellent introduction to the alignment problem; the discussion of Less Wrong mostly focuses on cognitive biases, but also covers a few other key concepts like the Map and Territory and Bayesianism; the Center for Applied Rationality is mostly reduced to just double crux; Slatestarcodex is often quoted, but not a focus; and Effective Altruism isn’t the focus, but there’s a good general introduction. I also thought he dealt well with someone of the common criticisms of the community.
Even though there are notable omissions, these are understandable given the need to keep the book to a reasonable length. And it could have been possible to more fully capture the flavour of the community, but given how hard it is to describe the essence of a community with such broad interests, I think he did an admirable job. All in all, this is an excellent introduction to the topic if you’ve been hearing about AI Safety or Less Wrong and want to dive in more