'The best up-to-date, go-to book on the social and economic implications of artificial intelligence - Tyler Cowen'

Rule of the Robots explores the future implications of artificial intelligence as a uniquely scalable and potentially disruptive technology.

In this sequel to his prescient New York Times bestseller Rise of the Robots, Martin Ford presents us with a striking vision of the very near future. He argues that AI is a uniquely powerful technology, a kind of "electricity of intelligence" that is altering every dimension of human life, often for the better with advanced science being done by machines who can solve problems humans can not. AI has the potential to help us fight climate change or the next pandemic, but it also has a capacity for profound harm. Deep fakes-AI-generated audio or video of events that never happened-are poised to cause havoc throughout society. AI empowers authoritarian regimes like China with unprecedented mechanisms for social control. And AI can be deeply biased, learning bigoted attitudes from the data used to train algorithms and perpetuating them.

Hard-hitting and thought-provoking, covering everything from self-driving cars to the history of deep learning to apps for diagnosing skin cancer, Rule of the Robots challenges our fears and preconceptions about artificial intelligence. Ford argues that AI is here to stay and the real question is not how to stop it, but how to control its negative potential and harness its power for good as AI transforms our economy, our politics, and our lives.

Over roughly the past decade, the field of artificial intelligence has taken a revolutionary leap forward and is beginning to deliver practical applications that are already transforming the world around us, The primary accelerant of this progress has been "deep learning"-a machine learning technique based on the use of multi-layered artificial neural networks of the kind employed by the researchers at Stanford,

The basic principles of deep neural networks have been understood for decades, but recent dramatic advances have been enabled by the confluence of two relentless trends in information technology: First, the arrival of vastly more powerful computers has, for the first time, allowed neural networks to transition into truly capable tools, And, second, the enormous troves of data now being generated and collected across the information economy are providing the resource that is crucial to training these networks to perform useful tasks,

As artificial intelligence is successfully applied to more and more areas, it is becoming clear that it is evolving into a uniquely consequential technology, A flexible resource that can-perhaps someday with almost a flick of a switch-apply cognitive capability to virtually any problem we face, Ultimately, this new utility will deliver not just the ability to analyse and make decisions but to solve complex problems and even exhibit creativity,

The AI Disruption explores the future implications of artificial intelligence by viewing it not as a specific innovation, but rather as a uniquely scalable and potentially disruptive technology - a powerful new utility poised to deliver a transformation that will someday rival the impact of electricity,

According to software developer Martin Ford, artificial intelligence (AI) will probably transform society faster than electricity did, but with unpredictable effects. His well-informed study notes a 2016 forecast that within five years, radiologists would be overtaken by advances in AI. But that hasn't happened: AI cannot currently integrate key information from sources such as clinical notes. AI's future, Ford concludes, lies somewhere between the science-fictional extremes of utopian Star Trek and dystopian The Matrix