From the pioneering CEO of Microsoft AI and author of New York Times bestselling The Coming Wave, a momentous new book grappling with the imminent arrival of AI superintelligence, exploring the ways it will transform civilization.
HUMANIST SUPERINTELLIGENCE
by Mustafa Suleyman
with Michael Bhaskar
Crown Currency, September 2027
What was once myth and metaphor is now becoming engineered reality. The looming emergence of artificial superintelligence, and the concurrent rise of potentially conscious AI, marks a fundamental turning point in the human story. The profound questions we once posed of our gods, we must now pose of our own technological creations. Can we trust them? Do they serve our interests or their own? What are their limits or end goals?
HUMANIST SUPERINTELLIGENCE, taking the baton from Suleyman’s prophetic smash hit The Coming Wave, grapples with each of these existentially important questions about the future of AI. But more crucially, it offers a desperately-needed roadmap forward—one grounded in the guiding principles of caution and foresight, rather than in a blind faith in inevitable progress that that has engulfed so much of Silicon Valley.
As Suleyman argues, the arrival of conscious superintelligence will require responsible AI developers to go far beyond the containment and alignment programs of today. AI systems of the future will not just need blindly follow our most virtuous human values, but will need to fully embody them. And in the absence of competent regulators, it will be incumbent upon AI architects themselves to take on the unnatural (yet existentially important) responsibility of backing away from the most extreme, misanthropic uses of the technology—even in the face of overwhelming pressures and incentives to go in the other direction.
In our collective choice to develop superintelligence, we are taking the fire we once stole from Olympus and using it to forge new kinds of minds. New gods. And if there is one thing our myths teach us, it is that from this moment forward, we must proceed with profound care.
Mustafa Suleyman is the CEO of Microsoft AI and New York Times bestselling author of The Coming Wave. Previously he co-founded and was the CEO of Inflection AI, and he also co-founded DeepMind, one of the world’s leading AI companies.
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