Science world luminary John Brockman assembles twenty-five of the most important scientific
minds people who have been thinking about the field artificial intelligence for most of their
careers for an unparalleled round-table examination about mind thinking intelligence and
what it means to be human. Artificial intelligence is today's story--the story behind all other
stories. It is the Second Coming and the Apocalypse at the same time: Good AI versus evil AI.
--John Brockman More than sixty years ago mathematician-philosopher Norbert Wiener published a
book on the place of machines in society that ended with a warning: we shall never receive the
right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.... The hour is very late and
the choice of good and evil knocks at our door. In the wake of advances in unsupervised
self-improving machine learning a small but influential community of thinkers is considering
Wiener's words again. In Possible Minds John Brockman gathers their disparate visions of where
AI might be taking us. The fruit of the long history of Brockman's profound engagement with the
most important scientific minds who have been thinking about AI--from Alison Gopnik and David
Deutsch to Frank Wilczek and Stephen Wolfram--Possible Minds is an ideal introduction to the
landscape of crucial issues AI presents. The collision between opposing perspectives is
salutary and exhilarating some of these figures such as computer scientist Stuart Russell
Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn and physicist Max Tegmark are deeply concerned with the threat
of AI including the existential one while others notably robotics entrepreneur Rodney Brooks
philosopher Daniel Dennett and bestselling author Steven Pinker have a very different view.
Serious searching and authoritative Possible Minds lays out the intellectual landscape of one
of the most important topics of our time.
