Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick

This book takes a balanced view of AI. It is here. It can help us do a lot of powerful things. It will also cause a lot of changes. It can succeed at many complex tasks, yet can stumble at seemingly easy tasks. It likes to please, and will "hallucinate" to provide answers we want. We need to stay involved to make sure it doesn't spin out of control. Education and work will change. We still don't know the limits of AI. Maybe it will get much better. Maybe we are near it's limit now. There can also be many negative and positive outcomes. It will require work to be on the good side.

The Magic of Code

The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future by Samuel Arbesman

What is the philosophy of coding? This book explores computer programming from a near metaphysical standpoint. How are we able to communicate with computers? How has this communication evolved over time? How does this relate to the way we can describe ourselves with genetics? It is a different take on the history of code and how it impacts us.

Antibodies

Antibodies by Charles Stross

This short story was first published in 2000, and later published in the compilation Toast: And Other Rusted Futures. A mathematician publishes a paper that solves the traveling salesman problem and transforms NP-complete problems to easily solvable ones. This seemingly breaks all cryptography. The story them picots to AIs gone amok. The AI has grown and taken on an identity of its own. It has started to consume all electronic resources and then goes on to inhabit the real world. A couple is trying to reach an "extraction point" where they can escape from this world. Alas, they are caught a little before escaping. Luckily, they appear to have "anitbodies" and are able to escape. There are a few interesting concepts in this story, but they don't quite come together.