June 2023

It is not often you see a collaboration like this but it does point to the sense of growing urgency in conversations and deliberations around AI.

In this book, three leading thinkers joined forces to consider how AI may impact our relationship with knowledge, politics and each other.

Henry A Kissinger - previously US Secretary of State, Eric Schmidt – previously CEO of Google, and Daniel Huttenlocher is surely an all-star line up for a book exploring this issue.

The book contains a series of dialogues from the authors who contemplate the impact of AI against a technological, historical and human backdrop. They say themselves that “AI’s promise of epoch-making transformations – in society, economics, politics and foreign policy – portends effects beyond the scope of any single author’s of field’s traditional focuses.”

The book poses lots of pertinent questions such as –
- What do AI-enabled ‘friends’ look like, especially to children? (Snapchat have recently added an ‘AI friend’ to all accounts)
- What does AI-enabled war look like?
- When AI participates in assessing and shaping human action, how will humans change?
- What, then, will it mean to be human?

These are profound questions. Rather than promise answers, the authors encourages us to seek answers ourselves, collectively and collaboratively

“Human and artificial intelligence are meeting, being applied to pursuits on national, continental and global scales. Understanding this transition, and developing a guiding ethic for it, will require commitment and insight from many elements of society: scientists and strategists, statesmen and philosophers, clerics and CEOs. This commitment must be made within nations and among them. Now is the time to define both our partnership with artificial intelligence and the reality that will result.”

This book is a timely and brilliantly articulated reminder for us to be clear about the questions that need to be asked and also be clear that we all have a stake in the answers.