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vol. 22 no. 3, September, 2017

Book Reviews


Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: paths, dangers, strategies.. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. xvi, 415p. ISBN 978-0-19-873983-8. £9.99/$15.95

The field of artificial intelligence has had its ups and downs over the past fifty years or so, at one point it seemed that some form of computer-based 'intelligence' would soon make human workers redundant, only for that dream to the shattered by the 'AI winters' of the 70s and 80s. Over the past few years, however, the prospects of artificial intelligence appears to have improved. Chess grandmater Garry Kasparov's defeat by IBM's Deep Blue in 1997 was really a matter of huge computational power, rather than AI, but the more recent success of AlphaGo in beating one of the world's top three Go players, was genuine AI, or more correctly, perhaps, 'machine learning'.

At a more practical level, and one that affects many more millions of people, Google recently announced the abandonment of its existing machine translation programme, which has fuelled Google Translate, in favour of a new 'machine learning' approach, which produces translations closer to those achieved by human translators.

Professor Tom Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
August, 2017


How to cite this review

Wilson, T.D. (2017). Review of: Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: paths, dangers, strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.Information Research, 22(3), review no. R609 [Retrieved from http://informationr.net/ir/reviews/revs609.html]


Information Research is published four times a year by the University of Borås, Allégatan 1, 501 90 Borås, Sweden.