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Our Final Invention
- Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
- Narrated by: Gary Dana
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
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Our Final Invention
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Summary
A Huffington Post Definitive Tech Book of 2013
Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the "smart" in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence.
In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI’s Holy Grail - human-level intelligence. Once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful, and more alien than we can imagine.
Through profiles of tech visionaries, industry watchdogs, and groundbreaking AI systems, Our Final Invention explores the perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? And will they allow us to?
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What listeners say about Our Final Invention
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- mike ryan
- 07-06-15
unfounded assumptions,biased unsupported opinions.
I got through a few chapters before giving up.no evidence to support any statements.pop "science" at best and far surpassed by similar books written by people actually knowledgeble of the subject matter.Author seems have done sparse if any actual research.While I disagree with the opinions in this book I came ready, with an open mind,but I can't take this seriously given the author hasn't backed any of it up with research or statistics the would actually hold up.Savevyour money.
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8 people found this helpful
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Adrian Shaw
- 07-12-17
Terrible audiobook
What would have made Our Final Invention better?
There are no facts or figures in this book. It is, instead, an emotional rant with no substance. The narrator is possibly one of the worst I have heard on audible
Would you ever listen to anything by James Barrat again?
No
Would you be willing to try another one of Gary Dana’s performances?
No
You didn’t love this book--but did it have any redeeming qualities?
None,
Any additional comments?
Read Noah Harari's 'Homo Deus' instead
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Paul Murphy
- 02-12-20
“ A nod is as good as a wink to a blind man?”
This one is like an astrophysicist appearing at the time the Cretaceous–Tertiary (K-T) boundary was being laid down... and explaining the possible consequences of an asteroid hitting the earth, to a dinosaur.
Something tells me for the vast majority of the people on the planet ditto...applies.
Now for people that are interested in the topic covered.... definitely an intro to the dark side of the ‘force’
Why “Genesis 2.0” may not be that bad of an alternative title...
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Ivan Tomica
- 28-06-18
Many pessimistic assumptions
Many pessimistic assumptions about technology without almost any proof or anything to back it up except quotes from "famous people in the field".
Raises some good concerns but provides no tangeable solutions.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Segismundo
- 25-07-17
Great book in a fast moving landscape.
Needs a new edition. Three or four years is a long time in artificial intelligence.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Kevin
- 03-06-21
Very insightful and thought provoking
Love the book and the approach taken by the Author to explain the issues and challenges we are likely to face. Some of the content is a little dated but that's to be expected of a book like this.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Chris
- 17-02-21
Brilliant
Made a technical subject easy to follow and very interesting to listen too. Covered the history well and is balanced by making the reader aware of opinions that go against his opinion.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Mylo Kaye
- 12-01-21
Great choice of narrator
Struggling to know if the narrator is human, or AI. Authors discusses this very concept in first few chapters. Listen for ‘The Turing Test’.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Anonymous User
- 30-07-20
It is as expected for the most part. just scarier.
as the name suggests, we know there's not much we can do once the AI Ginni is out of the bottle...
but learning about how it's being developed by finance, defence n terrorist organizations makes one feel a lot more scared than b4...
in any case there was little speculation. the book is mostly factual so it's a bit dissapointing because we read this stuff written by experts to see what their wildest imagination is so we get a better sense of it. could have explored more "possible scenarios" in wild speculation.
otherwise good summary of how we r doomed.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Chris
- 10-06-20
makes you think
great book really opens your eyes to the future, while some bits are a little dated the principle is spot on
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Keegan
- 11-04-15
Kind of chilling
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
Yes, mostly because it's the kind of book I would want to discuss with someone after. There are so many speculations in this book that would be fun to explore.
How could the performance have been better?
Oh, I thought they actually used text to speech software to record this title. It was quite monotonous and slow. I used the x2 option to compensate.
Was Our Final Invention worth the listening time?
Yes, but take it all with a grain of salt. Apply the same skepticism the author encourages you to take towards the other authors writing a more utopic vision for AI. As always the future probably lies somewhere in the middle. It was a lot of information, I'll probably be seeking out other books from some of the people he mentions.
Any additional comments?
My biggest frustration was that his inconsistent ideas about the anthropomorphizing of AI. He rejected any human qualities that would be good, but was okay attributing human qualities that would be bad. For example, Dismissing that AI would ever get bored, that's a human quality. But claims that they would of course desire freedom? That sort of cherry picking of anthropomorphized traits to support his thesis.
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21 people found this helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Gary
- 19-07-14
Speculative look without foundation
The author could be right, advanced AI could be the final step for humans and can lead to our own extinction, but the author deals mostly in speculation and never gives us a firm foundation for why that will happen. He does mention Alan Turing and the cracking of the enigma code in WW II. The story is much more nuanced than he lets on in this book and for anyone interested, I would highly recommend "Seizing the Enigma" available at audible (Polish Mathematicians had a large role in cracking the code too! as well as many, many others).
The author would have been better served by just slightly changing his story, adding a narrative, and writing himself a fairly good science fiction story instead.
I'm not minimizing the potential seriousness that transcending the singularity can portend for us humans, but unfortunately this book does not make a convincing case.
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14 people found this helpful
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 23-01-20
The Rant of an Unqualified Fearmongorer
Maybe it’s a bit telling when, in the introduction, the author essentially claims that most expert opinions are uneducated and incorrect, and that we should listen instead to him, a non-expert, and his cherry-picked sample of experts who agree with him.
Moreover, the arguments presented, while possible, are unlikely; yet they are stated as inevitabilities. Many things about this book overall bother me greatly in their inaccuracy, and serve no purpose other than to spread unwarranted technophobia.
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8 people found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Shaun J. Nigro
- 01-05-18
Informative Fearmongering
While the book presents interesting and often significant accounts of developments in AI from past to present, its author tends to fill out the source information with an annoyingly unwavering tone of doom. At times his fear of all robots seems to follow from a rational discussion involving inevitable implications. But most of the time, the narrative and interviews seem to have been conducted with a predetermined bias instilled by a misunderstanding of how the tech works. If you can tolerate a doomsday/sensationalist narrative, the nonfiction history alone may carry you through.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- RI in Canada
- 20-02-16
Alarmist, but an important alarm
Barat writes in layperson's terms because he believes the debate about artificial intelligence (AI) needs to be shared by all people, and that the fundamental ethical questions do not require elaborate AI expertise.
The tone of the book is somewhat alarmist, but that is because he is documenting alarming things. I've seen some reviews that critique the work as repetitive, but I think those folks are missing the point. He is working through how different approaches to AI development all reinforce the same conclusion that we are entering an era that is extremely dangerous to human survival. By showing how this comes to be through both the cognitive science and the computer science approaches to AI, he demonstrates that we are gambling with the life of our species regardless. Also, in the final chapters where he talks about the potential for malicious hackers (like the Israeli and US governments) and mistakes, he shows that we do not have the capability to control or develop "friendly AI".
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Serge Laforest
- 16-08-17
Awfully boring science fiction book
I would only recommend that book to technology inept paranoiac thriving on conspiracy theories.
A very boring book.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Chance
- 10-04-17
Read by a robot.
I suppose it's appropriate for a book about AI to be read by a robot, but it was distracting nonetheless.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- John
- 02-03-17
IT professionals beware
This is a sensationalistic style book. Some good info, mostly elaborated DRAMA. The AI concern is REAL, but programmers will be frustrated listening to this.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Ryan
- 13-06-16
Fascinating - something everyone should be aware o
really interesting, written for the layman. only complaint is that it's a bit drawn out. I feel like most of the points are made if the first half of the book
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 27-05-15
Better watch a Terminator movie...
What disappointed you about Our Final Invention?
The premise of the book is not well supported. The assumptions made seem unrealistic without any scientific background. I think that the book is targeting a specific audience who finds excitement in reading about dystopian societies and is afraid of technology. It is better not to touch subjects that we don't fully understand such as code replication and debugging, just to make an impression. I am really shocked and disappointed listening to this kind of reasoning: "Man has created nuclear bombs that can destroy the earth, computers will be smarter than men so....computers will be able to destroy the world if the decide so....". Come on.....I have a scientific background (doing PhD in computer science), but I think anyone with a brief understanding of technology and common sense will have the same opinion.
PS: I didn't finish reading the book,it was impossible for me to continue...
What three words best describe Gary Dana’s voice?
The problem is not the narration
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2 people found this helpful