The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms which it can use for something else

This is a talk about AI and AI risk. But it’s also more importantly about a community of people who are trying to think rationally about intelligence, and the places that these thoughts are taking them, and what insight they can and can’t give us about the future of the human race over the next few years. It explains why these people are worried, why they might be right, and why they might be wrong. It is a book about the cutting edge of our thinking on intelligence and rationality right now by the people who stay up all night worrying about it.

Along the way, we discover why we probably don’t need to worry about a future AI resurrecting a perfect copy of our minds and torturing us for not inventing it sooner, but we perhaps should be concerned about paperclips destroying life as we know it; how Mickey Mouse can teach us an important lesson about how to program AI; and how a more rational approach to life could be what saves us all.

Tom Chivers was BuzzFeed UK’s science writer between 2015 and 2018. Before joining BuzzFeed, he spent seven years at the Telegraph, where he once interviewed Terry Pratchett and was told he was ‘far too nice to be a journalist’. He has struggled on despite this handicap, winning a British Health Journalism award and an American Psychological Society media award, being shortlisted for an Association of British Science Writers award and being highly commended in the Royal Statistical Society’s annual journalism prizes. He tweets @TomChivers.