Description
50 Predictions About War, Work, Power and Life in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
How much of our future are we willing to hand over to machines?
Our jobs. Our children’s education. Our medical decisions. The information we trust. The wars fought in our name. Artificial intelligence could change all of them — and concentrate extraordinary power in the hands of those who control it.
In The AI Decade, newspaper editor Tom Sinclair examines what the next ten years could bring: the race between America and China, the disruption of professional work, the promise of robot labour and AI medicine, and the risks of giving increasingly capable systems more freedom to act.
Drawing on research and daily experience of working with AI, Sinclair asks who will benefit, who could lose out, and whether our institutions can keep pace.
At the heart of the book are fifty specific predictions, each with a probability and a deadline. Readers can return to them, test them and judge where he got it wrong.
The machines are becoming more capable. What we choose to entrust to them will define the decade.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Sinclair is the editor of The Pembrokeshire Herald and Herald.Wales.
He brings two decades of editorial experience and daily use of generative AI to the questions shaping our future.
Bill Human –
Most books about artificial intelligence arrive carrying either a trumpet or a fire extinguisher. Tom Sinclair’s The AI Decade brings a notebook. It asks what happens when we hand machines more work, more decisions and more authority, then discover that the arrangements for watching them are still waiting for a meeting invite.
Sinclair covers an enormous amount of ground: jobs, classrooms, hospitals, companionship, elections, warfare and the companies building the systems. The book’s strength is its refusal to make every example prove the same alarming point. A robot helping on a car production line has not built the car. A promising medical trial is not permission to remove the doctor. A troubling laboratory test is not proof that a machine has developed a secret plan.
Sinclair keeps making those distinctions, and the argument is stronger for it.He is particularly good at following a technical change to the person at the other end of it. The labour question is not confined to whether unemployment rises. It is also whether a young worker can still get a first job, learn the trade and share in the value their work helps create. That is where the grand talk about productivity meets the wage packet.The book ends with fifty dated predictions, each assigned a probability and a test. Some of the scoring rules could be tighter, but the decision to print them is admirable.
Sinclair has put his forecast on the counter and invited readers to keep the receipt.The AI Decade is readable, serious and alert to both benefit and harm. Its governing question stays with you: as we delegate more, who can see what the systems are doing, who can intervene, and who answers when something goes wrong? That is a better question than asking the office printer whether it intends to become our king.