Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'd give this book one star except it is well written and provides a lot of useful information. Don't let that fool you. The author presents an inchoate look at the dangers of AI. She represents herself as a futurist and at various points she identifies the 'cause' of upcoming problems as: lack of diversity in the tech community, lack of a military-industrial complex that includes AI, the profit motive (capitalism), the FAILURE of AI to actually do its job, the LACK of interoperability of exhaustive personal data files maintained by the silicon valley giants, and the capacity of a conformist communist society (China) to out-innovate a free democratic one. To name a few! The book's future scenarios are ridiculous and internally inconsistent. For example, in one we have AI sexbots fully able to converse and satisfy our wants, but on the very next page the same economy is unable to make robot carpenters or plumbers (an artifice allowing the author to say blue-collar workers remain in demand while white-collar suffers unemployment). The second part of the book goes into great detail on ways to prevent some of the dire consequences presented in the scenarios. The problem is, if you can't actually identify the problem, all your recommendations can be implemented and you will still have a dire future (just not the one you thought you were getting). I won't go into all of the reasons why most of the identified problems are untenable, nor will I discuss the author's misreading of how economies work or the unlikelihood of the times and trajectories in her scenarios. That would be long winded and boring, and a skeptical reader should be able to note all of these things for him / herself. Understand, there IS a problem with advanced AI. If you read the book, keep all three eyes open.