Creators of Artificial Genius: About the Rebels Who Empowered the Intelligence of Google, Facebook, and the Whole World

The Hidden History of High Technology of Our Time

What does it mean to be intelligent? To be human? What are we really waiting for from life and the intelligence we possess or could create?

Through exclusive reports and hundreds of interviews, New York Times journalist Cade Metz takes readers into the hidden corridors of Silicon Valley, where answers to many questions can be found. There, powerful artificial intelligence is being created, which has already become an integral part of big business, social discourse, and our everyday lives - even if we don’t notice it.

For a long time, artificial intelligence was considered a question of the distant future, dismissed, and engaged in only by the most fanatical researchers, who were regarded as eccentrics and outcasts in the scientific community. But two scientists emerged who changed everything.

They pursued their lofty goals by completely different paths, and soon their ideas ignited a new type of arms race, involving Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and OpenAI, a new research laboratory founded by Elon Musk, one of the lords of Silicon Valley. Many believe that the Chinese will cross the finish line first.

The book vividly describes this dramatic conflict of national, corporate, and scientific interests, and also pays considerable attention to concerns related to privacy, security, and bias. Like a Victorian novel, the author depicts a whole world populated by eccentric, incredibly intelligent, and unimaginably wealthy characters, leading us to the deepest moral dilemmas. As in a good thriller, astonishing facts and the narrative arc provoke a fundamental, vital question in the reader’s mind: how far will we let this go?