The Rationalists Guide to the Galaxy..., Tom Chivers
The Rationalists Guide to the Galaxy..., Tom Chivers
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The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy
Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity's Future

Author: Tom Chivers

Narrator: Tom Chivers

Unabridged: 8 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/13/2019

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included

Synopsis

'A fascinating and delightfully written book about some very smart people who may not, or may, be about to transform humanity forever' JON RONSON

'The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms which it can use for something else'
This is a book about AI and AI risk. But it's also more importantly about a community of people who are trying to think rationally about intelligence, and the places that these thoughts are taking them, and what insight they can and can't give us about the future of the human race over the next few years. It explains why these people are worried, why they might be right, and why they might be wrong.
It isn't, on the other hand, a book about the future - it doesn't try to guess how many of us are going to be put out of work by AI, or what the operating system in your house might be able to do ten years hence. Instead, this is a book about the cutting edge of our thinking on intelligence and rationality right now by the people who stay up all night worrying about it.
Along the way, we discover why we probably don't need to worry about a future AI resurrecting a perfect copy of our minds and torturing us for not inventing it sooner but we should be concerned about paperclips destroying life as we know it; how Mickey Mouse can teach us an important lesson about how to programme AI; and why Spock is not as logical as we think he is.

(p) Orion Publishing Group Ltd 2019

About Tom Chivers

Tom Chivers is a science writer and author. He was given Royal Statistical Society 'Statistical Excellence in Journalism' awards in 2018 and 2020, and was declared the Science Writer of the Year by the Association of British Science Writers in 2021. His two previous books are The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy and How to Read Numbers (with David Chivers).

Reviews

Goodreads review by Gavin on June 27, 2019

To my surprise I recommend this for anyone. (The chapters are tiny and I did the whole thing in an hour.) For outsiders it's an honest and nontechnical portrait of a new, strange, and wonderful endeavour; and Chivers shows his path from ordinary sceptical thoughtfulness to taking the idea seriously.......more

Goodreads review by Dan on November 11, 2019

The author is a reporter at Buzzfeed, where he does in-depth old school reporting on science topics, not the silly meme stuff. Overall, I think the author managed to write a fairly even handed analysis of the rationalist community, which turns out to be largely sympathetic to the cause. As someone w......more

Goodreads review by Andrii on June 16, 2019

If you've never heard of the "Rationalist"/LessWrong community, this book does a reasonably good job of an almost balanced introduction (slightly positive skew). The main thread, however, of how the author came to take seriously the risk of superhuman intelligence bringing doom in the next century,......more

Goodreads review by Julia on September 14, 2021

Fun read I thought I knew enough about the rationality community that there wouldn't be much of interest to me in this book, but a lot of early history captured here was new or newish to me. I thought he captured the sense of things in the community surprisingly well.......more

Goodreads review by Peter on October 25, 2019

This book is a sympathetic portrayal of the rationalist movement by a quasi-outsider. It includes a well-organized explanation of why some people expect tha AI will create large risks sometime this century, written in simple language that is suitable for a broad audience. Caveat: I know many of the p......more

Quotes

A fascinating and delightfully written book about some very smart people who may not, or may, be about to transform humanity forever

Artificial Intelligence, of a superhuman level, is coming. But how soon will it emerge, and how will it impact our world? Will it offer us salvation or bring apocalypse? In this utterly captivating book, Tom Chivers meets both the computer engineers working to build an AI and the Rationalists striving to prevent the worst. Beautifully written, and with wonderful humour, this is a thrilling adventure story of our own future

Tom Chivers' meticulously researched book is intriguing, persuasive and eye-opening. His writing is warm and witty as he takes us on a surprisingly moving journey to decide - rationally - whether we really are playing Russian roulette with our future

This book is about so much more than AI. It's about what happens when an attempt at perfectly rational behaviour meets the messy complications of humanity and its achievements. In an increasingly digitised world, the outcome has something to say about us all. The brilliance of this book is the challenge it presents, because we can't examine the Rationalists without also examining ourselves. Tom Chivers is a fascinating and honest guide along that bumpy road

Tom Chivers' book is like a self-help guide to stop panicking about technology for people who watched Terminator too many times when they were young. The content is completely gripping. But I think the thing I like best is the tone. He has this OK-lets-all-chill-out-and-look-at-this-rationally approach which makes me feel, for whole minutes at a time, that maybe things are going to be OK and we won't all die in hellfire

In this informative account of his encounters with the Rationalists . . . Tom Chivers follows a formula pioneered by those chronicling Silicon Valley for Wired magazine in the 1990s. He writes movingly about his insecurities over what the future will bring, telling the head of CFAR, "I'm scared for my children" . . . It is a resonant moment' TLS

An intellectual history of our times THE TIMES

Excellent THE BIG ISSUE

Brilliant

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