Robin Hanson

This is an interesting idea taken to an autistic extreme which made it uninteresting. The core idea is that for a (to humans, brief) period, the first AIs might be emulated humans, and based on physics and logical extrapolations, one can make some interesting predictions about how they will be individually and as groups. The problem is the author went overboard on some very uninteresting areas, and didn't really have enough interesting projections to fill a book, so it ended up both long and devoid of content. The concept is great, and a 20-30 page treatment would be great, but not this.… (más)

Fittingly published on the 1st of April this book can be read in two ways. One is to treat it like an RPG setting book. An imaginative world with highly detailed descriptions, complete with cool potential plots for your campaign. The second way to read it is as a book trying to predict the future in much the same way as The Flintstones is recording history. Everything is strange yet it's all mimicking the current world with superficial differences.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter about computational reversibility - good luck with that if you're not a CS academic. I'm a software engineer and I only have a vague idea what it is and unless you know already you're out of luck as the author will not explain anything.

The rest is ridiculously specific descriptions of a future world - a bit like trying to forecast weather 20 years in advance by trying to get the exact temperature, rainfall, etc. on a particular Thursday in March, in your back garden. This is why I'm going with the former way of reading this book. Maybe someone will write a fiction book based on this setting - could be interesting.

One last thing: the author mentions that economists often predict the future correctly but the irrational uncoordinated populace fails to realise the correct prediction (a comment I've read before made by other economists), implying that the only way he can be wrong about his predictions in this book is if we all somehow conspire against him, at which point it's all our fault. AI research must be a traumatising field.… (más)