Everything Is F*cked(83)
5. Michael Klein, “Google’s AlphaZero Destroys Stockfish in 100-game Match,” Chess.com, December 7, 2017, https://www.chess.com/news/view/google-s-alphazero-destroys-stockfish-in-100-game-match.
6. Shogi is considered more complex because you are able to take control of your opponent’s pieces, leading to far more variations than even with chess.
7. For a discussion of the potential mass unemployment caused by AI and machine automation, check out the excellent E. Brynjolfsson and A. McAfee, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press, 2011).
8. K. Beck, “A Bot Wrote a New Harry Potter Chapter and It’s Delightfully Hilarious,” Mashable, December 17, 2017, https://mashable.com/2017/12/12/harry-potter-predictive-chapter.
9. J. Miley, “11 Times AI Beat Humans at Games, Art, Law, and Everything in Between,” Interesting Engineering, March 12, 2018, https://interestingengineering.com/11-times-ai-beat-humans-at-games-art-law-and-everything-in-between.
10. Much in the same way that today it’s almost impossible to imagine life without Google, email, or cell phones.
11. Evolutionarily speaking, humans gave up a lot to make their big brains possible. Compared to other apes, and especially mammals, we’re slow, weak, and fragile and have poor sensory perceptions. But most of what we lack in physical capabilities was given up to allow for the brain’s greater use of energy and longer gestation period. So, really, things worked out in the end.
12. See D. Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (New York: Penguin Books, 2011).
13. Well, technically, most of these didn’t exist until we came along, but I suppose that’s partly the point.
14. Haidt, The Righteous Mind, pp. 32–34.
15. The self-hatred is a reference to the inherent guilt that comes with existence, discussed in chapter 4. The self-destruction is, well, self-evident.
16. Such outlandish scenarios are actually quite serious and covered well in Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
17. Michal Kranz, “5 Genocides That Are Still Going on Today,” Business Insider, November 22, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/genocides-still-going-on-today-bosnia-2017-11.
18. “Hunger Statistics,” Food Aid Foundation, https://www.foodaidfoundation.org/world-hunger-statistics.html.
19. Calculated by author based on statistics from National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, https://ncadv.org/statistics.
About the Author
MARK MANSON is the New York Times and international bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck (with over five million in sales in the United States alone). His blog, MarkManson.net, attracts more than two million readers per month. Manson lives in New York City.
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