THE LAST BOOK WRITTEN BY A HUMAN

Burningham provides a blueprint for dealing with increasingly complex artificial intelligence in this nonfiction work.

“If you have had a sense that our future is both dependent on and imperiled by AI, you are not alone,” writes the author, a tech investor. But Burningham views the surge of AI into every corner of modern life to be a possible blessing, a circumstance in which “the obstacle now becomes the way,” allowing humans to awaken to their full potential (“The emergence of AI is, in some very real ways, an opportunity for human beings to wake up and become what we could be”). Since artificial intelligence challenges the ideas of what it means to be intelligent and what it means to be human, the author contends that the technology will spur humanity to a collective awakening, which he hopes will be guided by some core approaches, including embracing the uncertainty of it all, maintaining our human connections to friends and family, practicing inner grounding through practices like meditation and prayer, and savoring arts like literature, music, and film. Throughout the work, Burningham holds to his belief that machine-learning “offers us the chance to do something unprecedented: to consciously participate in upgrading the system of human existence.” The author’s tone throughout is engagingly optimistic, and though he can sometimes come across as overly credulous (some reasonable people may argue that those having an ayahuasca drug experience do not hear “the voice of God”; they simply hallucinate), many readers will very much appreciate a book that isn’t advising them to panic about the rise of AI. Burningham’s view that enhanced technology can be a boon to humans who are self-aware enough to harness it responsibly is essentially uplifting, and his call for love to be the antidote to “an age dominated by machines” is compelling.

A refreshingly optimistic look at the possibilities of human-AI interaction.