Machines of Loving Grace

I stumble across this book at Kinokuniya and what caught my eye and interest is its subtitle "The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots". As an economist and a researcher, I am very interested to know more what the economy and society will be like as we build better Artificial Intelligence, as you can see from my previous book reviews, The AI Economy & Data for the People.

This book is written with only two keywords in mind, "Artificial Intelligence" and "Intelligence Augmented". Basically, the first keyword, artificial intelligence means we create intelligence similar to humans, which means tasks can be taken over by robots whereas for the second keyword, "Intelligence Augmented", it means more of building intelligence that enhances the capabilities of humans, example of such tools will be like the calculator, computer and our smartphones.

John Markoff is currently a reporter at New York Times and writes for its Science section, has done a lot of research for the book. Firstly, he has covered many areas of Artificial Intelligence research like symbolic AI vs connectionism, robotics, driverless cars etc. Secondly, he gave a rich history to these different areas as well, who are the prominent key researchers and thought leaders in each area, turning the whole book into a namelist of who to follow if you are interested in the different topics of Artificial Intelligence.

As a researcher in Artificial Intelligence, it is always good to revisit the history from time to time, to understand the thought processes of these leaders, the perspective they have taken and perhaps extrapolate out to where we are going next in our research and engineering front of Artificial Intelligence. Its a great book for anyone who is in the field and will like to get that important Who's who namelist of the thought leaders in the different area of Artificial Intelligence. The history will also provide more ideas on whether we are going down the path of "Artificial Intelligence" or "Intelligence Augmented".

Conclusion

The audio-book open my horizon wider on how the previous researchers and thought leaders see where Artificial Intelligence research should be and definitely gave me more materials to research on. My rating is 4.5 out of 5 stars for it.