How to Think about AI: A Guide for the Perplexed

Revealing the unfolding story of Artificial Intelligence, Richard Susskind presents a short non-technical guide that challenges us to think differently about AI. Susskind brings AI out of computing laboratories, big tech companies, and start-ups - and into everyday life.

In recent years, and certainly since the launch of ChatGPT, there has been massive public and professional interest in Artificial Intelligence. But people are confused about what AI is, what it can and cannot do, what is yet to come, and whether AI is good or bad for humanity and civilisation - whether it will provide solutions to mankind’s major challenges or become our gravest existential threat. There is also confusion about how we should regulate AI and where we should draw moral boundaries on its use.

In How To Think About AI, Richard Susskind draws on his experience of working on AI since the early 1980s. For Susskind, balancing the benefits and threats of artificial intelligence is the defining challenge of our age. He explores the history of AI and possible scenarios for its future. His views on AI are not always conventional. He positions ChatGPT and generative AI as no more than the latest chapter in the ongoing story of AI and claims we are still at the foothills of developments. He argues that to think responsibly about the impact of AI requires us to look well beyond todayâs technologies, suggesting that not-yet-invented technologies will have far greater impact on us in the 2030s than the tools we have today. This leads Susskind to discuss the possibility of conscious machines, magnificent new AI-enabled virtual worlds, and the impact of AI on the evolution of biological humans.

Richard Susskind, President, Society for Computers and Law

Professor Richard Susskind OBE is President of the Society for Computers and Law, the Founder of Remote Courts Worldwide and, since 1998, has been Technology Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. The author of 10 books, his work has been translated into 16 languages and he has been invited to speak in over 50 countries. A law graduate of Glasgow University, he wrote his doctorate on artificial intelligence and the law at Oxford University in the mid-80s. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the British Computer Society.