Our Final Invention
Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
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Narrated by:
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Gary Dana
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By:
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James Barrat
About this listen
A Huffington Post Definitive Tech Book of 2013
Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the "smart" in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence.
In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI’s Holy Grail - human-level intelligence. Once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful, and more alien than we can imagine.
Through profiles of tech visionaries, industry watchdogs, and groundbreaking AI systems, Our Final Invention explores the perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? And will they allow us to?
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By: David Weinberger
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Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
- By: Daniel C. Dennett
- Narrated by: Jeff Crawford
- Length: 13 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett’s most successful “imagination-extenders and focus-holders” meant to guide you through some of life’s most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will.
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Loved it, but some philosophy background needed.
- By LongerILiveLessIKnow on 11-14-13
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AI Superpowers
- China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
- By: Kai-Fu Lee
- Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In AI Superpowers, Kai-fu Lee argues powerfully that because of these unprecedented developments in AI, dramatic changes will be happening much sooner than many of us expected. Indeed, as the US-Sino AI competition begins to heat up, Lee urges the US and China to both accept and to embrace the great responsibilities that come with significant technological power.
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Compelled to listen at 2x speed
- By LEE on 09-26-18
By: Kai-Fu Lee
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You Belong to the Universe
- Buckminster Fuller and the Future
- By: Jonathon Keats
- Narrated by: Josh Bloomberg
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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A self-professed "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist", the inventor Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was undoubtedly a visionary. Fuller's creations often bordered on the realm of science fiction, ranging from the freestanding geodesic dome to the three-wheel Dymaxion car to a bathroom requiring neither plumbing nor sewage. Yet in spite of his brilliant mind and lifelong devotion to serving mankind, Fuller's expansive ideas were often dismissed, and have faded from public memory since his death.
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Bucky, Bucky, Bucky
- By Amazon Customer on 08-25-18
By: Jonathon Keats
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The Intelligent Web
- Search, Smart Algorithms, and Big Data
- By: Gautam Shroff
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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As we use the Web for social networking, shopping, and news, we leave a personal trail. These days, linger over a Web page selling lamps, and they will turn up at the advertising margins as you move around the Internet, reminding you, tempting you to make that purchase. Search engines such as Google can now look deep into the data on the Web to pull out instances of the words you are looking for. And there are pages that collect and assess information to give you a snapshot of changing political opinion.
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Great book for learning about Deep learning
- By Darkpassenger on 04-16-15
By: Gautam Shroff
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Data-ism
- The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else
- By: Steve Lohr
- Narrated by: Steve Lohr
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Coal, iron ore, and oil were the key productive assets that fueled the Industrial Revolution. Today data is the vital raw material of the information economy. The explosive abundance of this digital asset, more than doubling every two years, is creating a new world of opportunity and challenge. Data-ism is about this next phase, in which vast, Internet-scale data sets are used for discovery and prediction in virtually every field. It is a journey across this emerging world with people, illuminating narrative examples, and insights.
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More business case than serious analysis
- By Godfried Gubbels on 06-03-15
By: Steve Lohr
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Program or Be Programmed
- Ten Commands for a Digital Age
- By: Douglas Rushkoff
- Narrated by: Douglas Rushkoff
- Length: 3 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In 10 chapters, composed of 10 "commands", Rushkoff provides cyber enthusiasts and technophobes alike with the guidelines to navigate the digital new universe. In this spirited, accessible poetics of new media, Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off, helping listeners to recognize programming as the new literacy of the digital age - and as a template through which to see beyond social conventions and power structures that have vexed us for centuries.
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Good book, but with some crazy ranting
- By Bjarne on 02-05-15
By: Douglas Rushkoff
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Human Machine
- Reimagining Work in the Age of AI
- By: Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson
- Narrated by: Jamie Renell
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Look around you. Artificial intelligence is no longer just a futuristic notion. It's here right now - in software that senses what we need, supply chains that "think" in real time, and robots that respond to changes in their environment. Twenty-first-century pioneer companies are already using AI to innovate and grow fast. The bottom line is this: Businesses that understand how to harness AI can surge ahead. Those that neglect it will fall behind. Which side are you on?
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A golf course book
- By C. Surdak on 07-30-18
By: Paul R. Daugherty, and others
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Automate This
- How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
- By: Christopher Steiner
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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It used to be that to diagnose an illness, interpret legal documents, analyze foreign policy, or write a newspaper article you needed a human being with specific skills - and maybe an advanced degree or two. These days, high-level tasks are increasingly being handled by algorithms that can do precise work not only with speed but also with nuance. These "bots" started with human programming and logic, but now their reach extends beyond what their creators ever expected.
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good start, book runs out of sustenace
- By RealTruth on 02-15-13
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Why Information Grows
- The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies
- By: César Hidalgo
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But according to MIT's anti-disciplinarian César Hidalgo, understanding the nature of economic growth demands transcending the social sciences and including the natural sciences of information, networks, and complexity. To understand the growth of economies, Hidalgo argues, we first need to understand the growth of order.
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Great book!
- By bpjammin on 01-07-17
By: César Hidalgo
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The Future of the Professions
- How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
- By: Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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This book predicts the decline of today's professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others to work as they did in the 20th century.
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I Hope It's Not All True
- By John on 05-01-16
By: Richard Susskind, and others
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Where Wizards Stay Up Late
- The Origins of the Internet
- By: Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon
- Narrated by: Mark Douglas Nelson
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Twenty-five years ago, it didn't exist. Today, 20 million people worldwide are surfing the Net. Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the exciting story of the pioneers responsible for creating the most talked about, most influential, and most far-reaching communications breakthrough since the invention of the telephone. In the 1960s, when computers where regarded as mere giant calculators, J.C.R. Licklider at MIT saw them as the ultimate communications devices.
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Absolutely fascinating and we'll researched
- By Elsa Braun on 10-01-16
By: Katie Hafner, and others
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Since it was first published in 2005, Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near and its vision of the future have been influential in spawning a worldwide movement with millions of followers, hundreds of books, major films, and thousands of articles. During the succeeding decade, many of Kurzweil's predictions about technological advancements have been borne out, and their viability has become familiar to the public through such now commonplace concepts. In this entirely new book Ray Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances in the singularity.
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RUINED audio.
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Science man lists names of chemicals for 9 hours
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"Telling The Truth...
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AI Superpowers
- China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
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In AI Superpowers, Kai-fu Lee argues powerfully that because of these unprecedented developments in AI, dramatic changes will be happening much sooner than many of us expected. Indeed, as the US-Sino AI competition begins to heat up, Lee urges the US and China to both accept and to embrace the great responsibilities that come with significant technological power.
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Compelled to listen at 2x speed
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By: Kai-Fu Lee
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The Coming Wave
- Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
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We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organize your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.
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Click bait
- By Buyer on 09-11-23
By: Mustafa Suleyman, and others
What listeners say about Our Final Invention
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- corridor5
- 04-02-19
Great book, a little repetitive
The content certainly makes the case for caution, risks, benefits, and AI invention awareness. I wonder, though, if the material could still be adequately covered without the exhibited repetition.
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- amazon_shopper
- 06-25-16
Good but biased.
Author omits details on the NON-armageddon outcome side. Granted, the book is about Armageddon, but he should've fleshed out the opposing view.
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- Steve
- 01-01-18
Required reading for everyone
Wow I really enjoyed this book. While I am not a fanatic about AI in any sense I do think this book should be required reading for everyone. I work in the technology sector and we get blindingly focused on our task and don’t objectively view any negative consequences of our work. But we do implement and work within our pre described boundaries. EVERYONE is waiting and helping to speed up the introduction of AGI, and its introduction will change everything.
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- Richard M. Keene
- 06-10-19
A good read but...
On the dangers of AI. A good read, many ideas. The author (and everyone else on the planet) has no idea what will really happen when we invent Artificial General Intelligence, but it will happen. Worth reading as it covers about every idea possible on what could happen. Given Humanity's track record of predicting the future; what will actually happen will be none-of-the-above.
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- Zerocleft
- 09-25-15
Apparently Skynet is real and it's going to take over everything
The author tells the reader multiple times that the AI are going to take over everything and destroy the earth. He has multiple interviews with futurists that all seem relatively optimistic about our future robot overlords but each vignette ends with talk of the coming disaster. I appreciate the potential for disaster. I think it is a good bit overblown, though.
I think it will be a very long time before we have anything even remotely approaching artificial general intelligence. And even if one emerges there is no reason to assume it will be high and a sociopathic manner. We have a desire not to be destroyed because of our emotional subsystem. We fear annihilation. We fear death.
Without the skewing of behavioral weighting of nodes in mind network that prioritize things like staying alive A nonhuman intelligence will not care if we want to pull the plug. It would not fear death anymore than my computer fears being turned off.
I don't think it's ethical to turn it off. I think that a sapient Computer should be afforded the rights we give to all sapient beings.
But I don't think that our robot overlords are going to be all that scary. I am much more concerned about the sociopathic humans that will be driving the smart but not yet sentient computers.
I think that if a super intelligence emerges it will probably be more of a benevolent dictator if it decides to interfere with humans and "help "them.
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- Adam
- 08-15-18
Good material Bad delivery
The subject topic was interesting and well thought out, but the narrator sounded like a robot himself. Maybe the producers planned it that way but over 7 hours of monotone narration is not fun.
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- Ryan
- 06-13-16
Fascinating - something everyone should be aware o
really interesting, written for the layman. only complaint is that it's a bit drawn out. I feel like most of the points are made if the first half of the book
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- Shuura
- 01-24-18
Revealing
It's funny at how ideas previously relegated to 80's B movies, Chopping Mall, are now a reality. You'd think that we would have been aware of the implications and potential usage of such AI and machinery. Go figure... I enjoyed this book greatly, but it saddens me that it will be largely overlooked by the general public.
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- Holbywan
- 06-26-17
Fantastically Terrifying & Incredibly Insightful
Great overview and in some cases deep dives into AGI and ASI. The book covers quite a bit of "narrow" AI too and talks in depth about the development, the different approaches being taken, and the inherent risks in creating a machine 10,000 times smarter than us. Will they need us? Hate us? Love us? Work for us or will we just be matter for them? Its going to be a wild ride, that is for sure!
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- David
- 08-16-21
Yes There’s a Problem, No This isn’t a Description of It
Massively overstates the risk of something that would take a LOT of very specific effort to cause to happen. As if Dr. Frankenstein enlisted all the help of the Scientists and people of his region in an effort to build a murderous monster….then had to invent new tech to do it as well.
The problem is that we will put less than intelligent tech in charge of important stuff. The more important the stuff the more we better hope for Super Intelligence to save our sorry …..
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