These Strange New Minds

Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI and Co-founder of DeepMind, described the landscape of digital technology as 'engaging, insightful, and panoramic.' The remarkable progress in digital technology has like never before introduced human-like AI systems. Platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are already changing economic structures, challenging democratic processes, and altering societal norms in unpredicted manners. These AI systems are poised to soon make autonomous decisions on behalf of users, fundamentally changing our daily activities. Understanding these systems is vital. Can AI truly think, comprehend, or possess knowledge? Might they have the ability to manipulate or deceive, and if so, how might they influence you? Whose interests do they actually serve? At what point could they transcend verbal communication to take real-world actions? Neuroscientist and AI researcher Christopher Summerfield delves into these issues, tracing AI’s trajectory from early theoretical propositions in the seventeenth century to the contemporary era of deep neural networks. His book offers an easily digestible, current, and authoritative analysis of this transformative technology. By grasping AI’s inner mechanics, we can tackle the major existential inquiry of our time: are we heading towards a technological utopia, or are we inadvertently writing ourselves out of history?