This colorful page-turner puts artificial intelligence into a human perspective. Through the
lives of Geoff Hinton and other major players Metz explains this transformative technology and
makes the quest thrilling. -Walter Isaacson author of The Code Breaker Entertaining and
valuable... essential.-Los Angeles Times THE UNTOLD TECH STORY OF OUR TIME What does it mean to
be smart? To be human? What do we really want from life and the intelligence we have or might
create? With deep and exclusive reporting across hundreds of interviews New York Times
Silicon Valley journalist Cade Metz brings you into the rooms where these questions are being
answered. Where an extraordinarily powerful new artificial intelligence has been built into our
biggest companies our social discourse and our daily lives with few of us even noticing.
Long dismissed as a technology of the distant future artificial intelligence was a project
consigned to the fringes of the scientific community. Then two researchers changed everything.
One was a sixty-four-year-old computer science professor who didn't drive and didn't fly
because he could no longer sit down-but still made his way across North America for the moment
that would define a new age of technology. The other was a thirty-six-year-old neuroscientist
and chess prodigy who laid claim to being the greatest game player of all time before vowing to
build a machine that could do anything the human brain could do. They took two very different
paths to that lofty goal and they disagreed on how quickly it would arrive. But both were soon
drawn into the heart of the tech industry. Their ideas drove a new kind of arms race spanning
Google Microsoft Facebook and OpenAI a new lab founded by Silicon Valley kingpin Elon Musk.
But some believed that China would beat them all to the finish line. Genius Makers dramatically
presents the fierce conflict between national interests shareholder value the pursuit of
scientific knowledge and the very human concerns about privacy security bias and prejudice.
Like a great Victorian novel this world of eccentric brilliant often unimaginably yet
suddenly wealthy characters draws you into the most profound moral questions we can ask. And
like a great mystery it presents the story and facts that lead to a core vital question: How
far will we let it go?
