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The Age of Em
Regular price: $29.95
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 788
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Perspective Shifter
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 31
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 26
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 26
The fruit of the long history of John Brockman's profound engagement with the most important scientific minds who have been thinking about AI - from Alison Gopnik and David Deutsch to Frank Wilczek and Stephen Wolfram - Possible Minds is an ideal introduction to the landscape of crucial issues AI presents. The collision between opposing perspectives is salutary and exhilarating; some of these figures are deeply concerned with the threat of AI, including the existential one, while others have a very different view.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wonderful insights from ingenious minds
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 665
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Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term complexity can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities, and our businesses.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating and clear enough for a lib arts major
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The Sentient Machine
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 156
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 141
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The future is now. Artificial "machine" intelligence is playing an ever-greater role in our society. We are already using cruise control in our cars and automatic checkout at the drugstore and are unable to live without our smartphones. The discussion around AI is largely polarized; people think either machines will solve all problems for everyone or they will lead us down a dark, dystopian path into total human irrelevance. Regardless of what you believe, the idea that we might bring forth intelligent creation can be intrinsically frightening.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Interesting take on Artificial Intelligence
- By Philomath on 11-21-17
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Fooled by Randomness
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- By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3,513
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,609
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2,598
This audiobook is about luck, or more precisely, how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business. It is already a landmark work, and its title has entered our vocabulary. In its second edition, Fooled by Randomness is now a cornerstone for anyone interested in random outcomes.
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5 out of 5 stars
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An Excellent and Worthwhile Book
- By Amazon Customer on 02-15-13
Publisher's Summary
Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like?
Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations, or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human.
Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times; an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs. In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size every few weeks.
Some say we can't know the future, especially following such a disruptive new technology, but Professor Robin Hanson sets out to prove them wrong. Applying decades of expertise in physics, computer science, and economics, he uses standard theories to paint a detailed picture of a world dominated by ems.
While human lives don't change greatly in the em era, em lives are as different from ours as our lives are from those of our farmer and forager ancestors. Ems make us question common assumptions of moral progress, because they reject many of the values we hold dear.
Read about em mind speeds, body sizes, job training and career paths, energy use and cooling infrastructure, virtual reality, aging and retirement, death and immortality, security, wealth inequality, religion, teleportation, identity, cities, politics, law, war, status, friendship, and love.
This book shows you just how strange your descendants may be, though ems are no stranger than we would appear to our ancestors. To most ems, it seems good to be an em.
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3.5 out of 5 stars
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- Ageel Alassif
- KSA
- 03-30-17
An analytical book suited as a reference book
Struggled to finish it , reads more like a reference book than a straight read.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Sumguynobuddynoes
- Sioux Falls, SD, United States
- 05-20-17
interesting but way too thorough
Great number if assumptions draws upon authors perception of Emulation robot society and behaviours.
Interesting concept, but too intricate in detail to be credible. Got boring in the details of Em societal workings.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- David
- 11-26-16
30% of time me spent describing itself
The author spends almost as much time describing the structure of the book and structure of his research as he does talking about the ACTUAL content. I prefer books that tell me directly what they have to say, versus telling me ad nauseam HOW they are going to tell me about it. LOTS of wasted time.
6 of 8 people found this review helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Anonymous User
- 07-12-18
Beginning is engaging and worth the time.
Interesting thought experiment and I appreciated the author's careful consideration to justify the scenario he presented. I found the content slightly repetitive, or too "in-the-weeds," at times which lead to a longer duration that caused me to lose interest during the latter two-thirds of the book.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Emmaly
- 07-02-17
Couldn't finish it
I couldn't finish it. It felt like it was never going to get to the point. That means a lot coming from me as I'll sit through just about anything.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- KA
- 01-11-17
Just plain awful, some thing that could be said within 1 hour, unnecessarily and painfully prolonged.
within 1 hour, unnecessarily and painfully prolonged. The author assumes throwing big words around makes him sound interacting. The worst book on AI I had listened to so far.
3 of 6 people found this review helpful
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Francis Murphy
- 06-01-18
Tedious !!!!!!!!
A dull idea that was obviously laboured over for considerable time that could be distilled down to a "bit of an idea". I couldn't get beyond half way, and I'm someone who rarely gives up on a book !! I wished I could my awareness at hyperspeed to get through it in the nanosecond it deserves.
0 of 2 people found this review helpful
