Professor Richard Susskind CBE KC (hon), a prolific legal author, used to joke about writing the same book every couple of years. But How to Think About AI: a Guide for the Perplexed — his 12th book, published tomorrow — is rather different.
Inexpensive, modestly priced and attractively produced in hardback by Oxford University Press, it’s aimed at the general reader who wants to know whether to be alarmed or enthused by the inexorable growth of artificial intelligence.
The subject is one that Susskind has been thinking about since 1981 and he answers the inevitable question in an epigram:
None of this book was written by AI (for better or worse).
But for how much longer? How soon will AI be able to write a book in the style of Richard Susskind? And will it be any good?
Those are among the issues addressed in How to Think About AI — and in unscripted remarks he made at its London launch last week. Susskind kindly allowed me to record the entire speech (see photograph above by Michael Cross) and I’m publishing a substantial extract from it as the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks. It’s fascinating and chilling in equal measure.
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