The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy: Superintelligent AI and the Geeks Who Are Trying to Save Humanity's Future

by Tom Chivers

Overview

'A fascinating and delightfully written book about some very smart people who may not, or may, be about to transform humanity forever' JON RONSON

'Beautifully written, and with wonderful humour, this is a thrilling adventure story of our own future' LEWIS DARTNELL, author of THE KNOWLEDGE and ORIGINS

Are paperclips going to destroy life as we know it?
What can Mickey Mouse teach us about how to programme AI?
Could a more rational approach to life be what saves us all?

This is a book about about a community of people who are trying to think rationally about intelligence and what insight they can and can't give us about the future of the human race. It explains why these people are worried about an AI apocalypse, why they might be right, and why they might be wrong. It is a book about the cutting edge of our thinking on intelligence and rationality right now by the people who stay up all night worrying about it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474608800
Publisher:	Orion
Publication date:	06/13/2019
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	742,082
File size:	912 KB

About the Author

Tom Chivers is a science writer and author. He was given Royal Statistical Society 'Statistical Excellence in Journalism' awards in 2018 and 2020, and was declared the Science Writer of the Year by the Association of British Science Writers in 2021. His two previous books are The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy and How to Read Numbers (with David Chivers).

Table of Contents

Introduction: 'I don't expect your children to die of old age' 1

Part 1 Introductions

1 Introducing the Rationalists 13

2 The cosmic endowment 25

Part 2 The Paperclip Apocalypse

3 Introducing AI 33

4 A history of AI 40

5 When will it happen? 45

6 Existential risk 50

7 The cryptographic rocket probe, and why you have to get it right first time 56

8 Paperclips and Mickey Mouse 60

9 You can be intelligent, and still want to do stupid things 66

10 If you want to achieve your goals, not dying is a good start 72

11 If I stop caring about chess, that won't help me win any chess games, now will it? 81

12 The brief window of being human-level 85

13 Getting better all the time 91

14 'FOOOOOM' 95

15 But can't we just keep it in a box? 100

16 Dreamed of in your philosophy 105

17 'It's like 100 per cent confident this is an ostrich' 109

Part 3 The Ways of Bayes

18 What is rationality? 117

19 Bayes' theorem and optimisation 121

20 Utilitarianism: shut up and multiply 131

Part 4 Biases

21 What is a 'bias'? 143

22 The availability heuristic 146

23 The conjunction fallacy 149

24 The planning fallacy 151

25 Scope insensitivity 154

26 Motivated scepticism, motivated stopping and motivated continuation 157

27 A few others, and the most important one 160

Part 5 Raising the Sanity Waterline

28 Thinking probabilistically 165

29 Making beliefs pay rent 173

30 Noticing confusion 176

31 The importance of saying 'Oops' 178

Part 6 Decline and Diaspora

32 The semi-death of Less Wrong 183

33 The IRL community 186

Part 7 Dark Sides

34 Are they a cult? 197

35 You can't psychoanalyse your way to the truth 211

36 Feminism 214

37 The Neoreactionaries 220

Part 8 Doing Good Better

38 The Effective Altruists 227

39 EA and AI 235

Part 9 The Base Rate of the Apocalypse

40 What are they doing to stop the AI apocalypse? 251

41 The internal double crux 260

42 Life, the universe and everything 268

Acknowledgements 273

Notes 275

Editorial Reviews

A fascinating and delightfully written book about some very smart people who may not, or may, be about to transform humanity forever

Artificial Intelligence, of a superhuman level, is coming. But how soon will it emerge, and how will it impact our world? Will it offer us salvation or bring apocalypse? In this utterly captivating book, Tom Chivers meets both the computer engineers working to build an AI and the Rationalists striving to prevent the worst. Beautifully written, and with wonderful humour, this is a thrilling adventure story of our own future—LEWIS DARTNELL, author of THE KNOWLEDGE and ORIGINS

Tom Chivers' meticulously researched book is intriguing, persuasive and eye-opening. His writing is warm and witty as he takes us on a surprisingly moving journey to decide - rationally - whether we really are playing Russian roulette with our future—HANNAH FRY, author of HELLO WORLD

This book is about so much more than AI. It's about what happens when an attempt at perfectly rational behaviour meets the messy complications of humanity and its achievements. In an increasingly digitised world, the outcome has something to say about us all. The brilliance of this book is the challenge it presents, because we can't examine the Rationalists without also examining ourselves. Tom Chivers is a fascinating and honest guide along that bumpy road—DR HELEN CZERSKI, author of THE STORM IN A TEACUP

Tom Chivers' book is like a self-help guide to stop panicking about technology for people who watched Terminator too many times when they were young. The content is completely gripping. But I think the thing I like best is the tone. He has this OK-lets-all-chill-out-and-look-at-this-rationally approach which makes me feel, for whole minutes at a time, that maybe things are going to be OK and we won't all die in hellfire—IAN DUNT, editor of politics.co.uk and author of BREXIT: WHAT THE HELL HAPPENS NOW?

In this informative account of his encounters with the Rationalists . . . Tom Chivers follows a formula pioneered by those chronicling Silicon Valley for Wired magazine in the 1990s. He writes movingly about his insecurities over what the future will bring, telling the head of CFAR, "I'm scared for my children" . . . It is a resonant moment'—TLS

An intellectual history of our times—THE TIMES

Excellent—THE BIG ISSUE

Brilliant—RAIA HADSELL, Research Director, DeepMind

From the Publisher