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Chapter 3 of Our Final Invention, “Looking into the Future,” showcases the ethics and risks of creating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) technologies and systems. AGI can be more applicable to the average person than ASI due to their understandability and operation on human level intellect. With the ability of both softwares, however, to self-improve and write its own code, once a machine achieves AGI, an intelligence explosion would be triggered, leading to the creation

In Chapter 2, of Our Final Invention, “The Two-Minute Problem,” James Barrat explores how the pursuit of power, profit, and global dominance fuels the rapid development of ASI. Governments and corporations are becoming so focused on being the first to achieve this monumental goal, that they often ignore the dangers and ethical concerns associated with it. This reflects a larger issue in our society - that greed frequently outweighs caution. The idea of “innovation” and “the n

The opening chapter of Our Final Invention introduces a troubling idea: that creating an Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) we can control, or even understand, may be far harder than imagined. The concept of a “friendly AI” assumes we can align the values of a machine to that of a human, but due to the inherent complexity and inconsistency of these values, they are nearly impossible to encode. Furthermore, in his reference to the short story, "Runaround," Barrat highlights t