The scramble to create superhuman AI has put us on the path to extinction—but it's not too late to change course, as two of the field's earliest researchers explain in this clarion call for humanity.
The book reads like a Scientology manual, the text interspersed with weird, unhelpful parables and extra notes available via QR codes ... Following their unspooling tangents evokes the feeling of being locked in a room with the most annoying students you met in college while they try mushrooms for the first time.
Tendentious and rambling, simultaneously condescending and shallow ... They are just wrong ... Yudkowsky and Soares fail to make an evidence-based scientific case for their claims. Instead, they rely on flat assertions and shaky analogies.
The projected results, while terrifying, are not all equally convincing ... Each chapter in the book begins with a parable, warning of the dangers to come. These parables sometimes read like gibberish, talking both down and up to the reader ... Of course, writing critically about AI without sounding alarmist is difficult. Yudkowsky and Soares don’t particularly care. They believe it’s more important to save the world than to understate their case ... Less a manual than a polemic. Its instructions are vague, its arguments belabored and its absurdist fables too plentiful. Yudkowsky and Soares are certainly experts in their field, but this book often reads like a disgruntled missive from two aggrieved patriarchs tired of being ignored.
