How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence - And Its Long Future

by Chris Stokel-Walker

Artificial intelligence will shake up our lives as thoroughly as the arrival of the internet. This popular, up-to-date book charts AI’s rise from its Cold War origins to its explosive growth in the 2020s.

Tech journalist Chris Stokel-Walker (TikTok Boom and YouTubers) goes into the laboratories of the Silicon Valley innovators making rapid advances in ‘large language models’ of machine learning. He meets the insiders at Google and OpenAI who built Gemini and ChatGPT and reveals the extraordinary plans they have for them.

Along the way, he explores AI’s dark side by talking to workers who have lost their jobs to bots and engages with futurologists worried that a man-made super-intelligence could threaten humankind.

He answers critical questions about the AI revolution, such as what humanity might be jeopardising; the professions that will win and lose; and whether the existential threat technologists Elon Musk and Sam Altman are warning about is realistic – or a smokescreen to divert attention away from their growing power. How AI Ate the World is a ‘start here’ guide for anyone who wants to know more about the world we have just entered.

Genres: Artificial Intelligence, Nonfiction, Computers, Technology

320 pages, Paperback

Published May 9, 2024

Reviews

[Quynh Mai · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is quite informative when update news on AI progression within recent 10 years. Things changed quickly makes ppl including me scare of singularity coming closely. I read this book with the intention of getting more knowledge and be aware of what’s potential of AI to prepare myself in this competitive world.
Eventually I realise that it’s useless to waste time on worrying about things that I cannot control. We will enter a new era, just as we did with previous eras of industrialization and modernization. No one can predict what will happen, but the only thing I can do is prepare myself with versatility to adapt to any possible changes.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

How AI Ate the World: A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence - And Its Long Future (2024) by Chris Stokel-Walker is still new as I write this, and that's perhaps the biggest thing going for this book at the moment. There are quite a few older books about AI, given that the field has a long history. But most of that history featured overselling and under-performance, leading to several so-called AI winters. That cycle of futility began to change in the 2010s, marking the start of the AI boom. The boom got its boots on properly with "Attention Is All You Need", per Wikipedia:

"a 2017 landmark research paper in machine learning authored by eight scientists working at Google. The paper introduced a new deep learning architecture known as the transformer, based on the attention mechanism proposed in 2014 by Bahdanau et al. It is considered a foundational paper in modern artificial intelligence, and a main contributor to the AI boom, as the transformer approach has become the main architecture of a wide variety of AI, such as large language models."

The AI boom then blasted into public awareness on November 30, 2022 with the initial realease of ChatGPT. Google itself, which had largely pioneered the boom, was caught rather flatfooted, but soon released its own public-facing AI LLM chatbot, initially called Bard, then rebranded to Gemini. Numerous competitors followed suit.

The current wave of chatbots had some missteps, but they are improving rapidly, and their capabilities are already jaw-dropping. The upshot is that older books about AI are largely obsolete now. They're still of historical interest, but won't be of much use to all the governments, corporations, and individuals who are scrambling to understand the impact that the new AI technology will have on seemingly everything humans do.

However, one impact that AI hasn't evidently had yet is on fact-checking books like this one. Stokel-Walker had me questioning whether I had entered a parallel universe with this sentence (emphasis mine):

"The Mechanical Turk played and beat some of the finest minds of its generation, including Benjamin Franklin two years before he became US President, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the English mathematician Charles Babbage."

While Benjamin Franklin was among the most prominent of the United States' founders, he never served as US President. As an Englishman, Stokel-Walker may be forgiven for missing a detail of US history, but this is the sort of minor detail that a competent AI assistant ought to be able to detect and flag. So I suppose it's safe to say the Singularity isn't here just yet.

It will be interesting to see how the AI boom plays out in the coming years. On the one hand, we might get mass unemployment, as AI begins ratcheting up the minimum standard of human intelligence necessary to make a human worker worth hiring. But on the other hand, maybe we'll see AI removing the "stupid" from all the organizations and Web sites we have to deal with. For example, if you've engaged with the Goodreads database to any degree, you've probably noticed it contains a lot of errors, which you may then report to the overworked staff of Goodreads human librarians. And hope your request will be seen among the flood of other help requests. An AI-enabled Goodreads might make the database cleaning nightmare a lot more efficient.

Similarly, if you've ever edited on Wikipedia, there are many tedious chores that AI could streamline. AI might also be able to provide a better than random guess as to whether your edits will "stick." A constant vexation on Wikipedia is where you think you've added an improvement, and some other editor deletes it. Presumably this largely unstated de facto standard of acceptability might be something an AI model could figure out by training on the entire editing history of Wikipedia.

Given that modern AI has pretty much rewritten the game rules, but reality takes time to catch up, we'll probably see any number of companies going the way of Blockbuster Video (a famous casualty of technological progress and a cautionary tale for business students).

If you happen to run or work for one of those suddenly "dead men walking" industries that doesn't realize it's dead yet, maybe reading a book like this one could give you some advance warning. At least by reading this book, you're showing more awareness than all the people who remain oblivious to the AI that is coming for them. This book doesn't go into the kind of technical detail that might tell an at-risk industry exactly what they need to do to get on the right side of history (that might be unknowable at the moment), but it's a place to start. I'd also suggest reading all the Wikipedia articles on AI that I linked from this review. I wish everyone the best of luck as we plunge headlong into our brave new AI world.

And of course you can ask your favorite AI LLM chatbot for pointers about what you should be doing to prepare for the impact of AI LLM chatbots on your job or anything else that you care about.

[Andrew Pratley · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is clear that the development AI(Artificial Intelligence) is moving fast & breaking things. What this book makes clear is that we are still very much in the early stages of the so-called AI Revolution. This book takes you beyond the hype.
Currently, AI systems can't think. They appear to be at this stage more sophisticated versions of predictive text. Useful to be sure but not awe inspiring. AI can't think yet. It relies on the quality of the data in its Large Language Model (LLB) . Size is important this helps the USA, China & Europe. The English language is predominant. Things are moving fast & it is clear we are on a path to A.G.I. ( Artificial general intelligence). When that comes, watch out!
Needless to say when that happens our societies & governments will be ill prepared for it. For now books like this are a real help since they give us a general idea of what is going on so we can prepare ourselves for what lies ahead in all its forms from good to bad.

[Bethany Dark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book after listening to Stokel-Walker give an excellent interview about AI on the Pod Save the UK podcast, in the hope that I too would be able to engage in debates about AI with nuance and understanding.

The opening quarter, which tracked the development of AI across history from Alan Turing to Sam Altman, had an excellently woven thread that created a memorable and convincing narrative. Once it reached the 21st century, however, the book devolved into a series of brief, tenuously-linked vignettes about various developments, uses, and concerns about, AI. Many of the sections lacked a sense of depth, whether because of glancing engagement with the scholarship or a too-expansive focus, and much of the book's content circled around case studies about ordinary AI users, which can be found in abundance on the internet and in our everyday life.

While this book certainly served as an interesting overview of, and introduction to, current AI debates, I was hoping that it would also help direct my opinion of AI and how I should best use or oppose the technology. This is not that book. The topic under debate is simply too expansive and various for Stokel-Walker to confidently draw any concrete conclusions, and he leaves the reader to interpret the content as they will. So if that's your jam, then go ahead - but I was hoping for something more.

[سليمان العوشن · Rating 4 out of 5]

حين تقرأ هذا الكتاب، تجد نفسك أمام مرآة تُريك المستقبل كما لم تتخيله من قبل. يأخذك المؤلف، بأسلوبه التحليلي العميق، في رحلة ذهنية تستعرض ليس فقط تطور الذكاء الاصطناعي، بل كيف غزا هذا الكيان الرقمي كل زاوية من زوايا حياتك. ستشعر أحيانًا بالدهشة، وأحيانًا بالقلق، وربما بالخوف من عالم قد لا تكون فيه أنت المحور بعد الآن. لكن الأهم من كل ذلك، أنك ستخرج من هذا الكتاب وأنت أكثر وعيًا بما يدور حولك. إنه ليس كتابًا تقنيًا فقط، بل هو دعوة للتأمل، للتساؤل، وربما لإعادة التفكير في دورك كإنسان في هذا العصر المتسارع. أنصحك بقراءته بعينٍ ناقدة، وبقلبٍ مفتوح.



تابعني على شبكات التواصل الاجتماعي

سليمان العوشن

http://about.me/aloshan

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[Navdeep Pundhir · Rating 1 out of 5]

It’s a bad book. The first third is a quick history of the AI which got it its sole star. Beyond that this is just a random collection of articles as to how people are interacting with chatGpT and the likes which is nothing more than media gibberish.

[Gisela RC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel we should give this book to the next person who says science / tech / AI is not or should not be political.

Very engaging, informative, and accessible.

[David Valdez · Rating 4 out of 5]

An ok book