'An engaging insightful and panoramic survey of where we are why we got here and what it
means. A brilliant guide to the most important technology of our times' Mustafa Suleyman CEO
of Microsoft AI & Cofounder of DeepMind 'For readers fascinated by the future of AI this
book is an eye-opening exploration of a revolution unfolding before our eyes' New York Journal
of Books Stunning advances in digital technology have given us a new wave of disarmingly
human-like AI systems. Chatbots like ChatGPT Claude and Gemini put the knowledge of all the
world's experts at our fingertips and can generate meaningful sentences equations and
computer code. The march of this new technology is set to upturn our economies challenge our
democracies and refashion society in unpredictable ways. We can expect these AI systems to
soon be making autonomous decisions on the user's behalf with transformative impact on
everything we do. It is vital we understand how they work. Can AI systems 'think' 'know' and
'understand'? Could they manipulate or deceive you and if so what might they make you do?
Whose interests do they ultimately represent? And when will they be able to move beyond words
and take actions for themselves in the real world? To answer these questions neuroscientist
and AI researcher Christopher Summerfield explains how these strange new minds work. He charts
the evolution of AI from the earliest inklings about thinking machines in the seventeenth
century to today's gargantuan deep neural networks. The resulting book is the most accessible
up-to-date and authoritative exploration of this radical new technology. Ultimately armed with
an understanding of AI's mysterious inner workings we can begin to grapple with the
existential question of our age: can we look forward to a technological utopia or are we in
the process of writing ourselves out of history? 'As a leading authority in both computational
neuroscience and the social impacts of AI Christopher Summerfield is perfectly situated to
explore the meaning and implications of these machines that are so uncannily like - and unlike
- ourselves ' Brian Christian co-author of Algorithms to Live by 'AI expert Chris
Summerfield takes us on a tour of this astonishing new technology and helps us to understand
the issues it raises. You might choose to be alarmed excited or indifferent to LLMs but you
should read Chris's book before you decide' Mike Woolridge author of The Road to Conscious
Machines
