Morality in the Age of Machines
The Age of AI: And Our Human Future by henry a. kissinger, eric schmidt, and daniel huttenlocher john murray, 256 pages, $30
T his is a book with three authors, which is both unusual and tricky because, while reading it, you’re constantly wondering who might have written the section or sentence before you. Unsurprisingly, it is a book incapable of entering into functional relationships. You cannot settle down with it or get to know the mind that created it, so as to succumb to or fight against it. This book has an insinuating purpose that is not literary, not purposefully discursive, not even argumentative. What it advances is a rather sly, self-interested, and one-sided brief for how the most pressing issue currently facing the human race might be boxed off to the benefit of you-know-who.
The overall impression is of a kind of manifesto for an election yet to be declared. Clearly, the book aims to seize the initiative on AI so that Big Tech can monopolize and control it, because that’s why Big Tech exists. Anyone genuinely seeking to understand what is happening with AI and the related spheres of transhumanism, posthumanism, and the Technological Singularity should probably look elsewhere.
