Books by Brian Christian

A fascinating exploration of how computer algorithms can be applied to our everyday lives.

'Vital reading. This is the book on artificial intelligence we need right now.' Mike Krieger, cofounder of InstagramArtificial intelligence is rapidly dominating every aspect of our modern lives influencing the news we consume, whether we get a mortgage, and even which friends wish us happy birthday. But as algorithms make ever more decisions on our behalf, how do we ensure they do what we want? And fairly?This conundrum - dubbed 'The Alignment Problem' by experts - is the subject of this timely and important book. From the AI program which cheats at computer games to the sexist algorithm behind Google Translate, bestselling author Brian Christian explains how, as AI develops, we rapidly approach a collision between artificial intelligence and ethics. If we stand by, we face a future with unregulated algorithms that propagate our biases - and worse - violate our most sacred values. Urgent and fascinating, this is an accessible primer to the most important issue facing AI researchers today.

For the first time in history, we are interacting with computers so sophisticated that we think they're human beings. This is a remarkable feat of human ingenuity, but what does it say about our humanity? Are we really no better at being human than the machines we've created?By mimicking our behaviour and conversation, computers have recently come within a single vote of passing the Turing Test, the widely accepted threshold at which a machine can be said to be 'thinking' or 'intelligent'. In this witty, wide-ranging and inspiring investigation, Brian Christian takes the recent and breathtaking advances in artificial intelligence as the opportunity to rethink what it means to be human, and what it means to be intelligent, in the 21st century.Competing head-to-head with the world's leading AI programmes at the annual Turing Test competition, he uses their astonishing achievements as well as their equally fascinating failings to reveal our most human abilities: to learn, to communicate, to intuit and to understand. And in an age when computers may be steering us away from these activities, he shows us how to become the most human humans that we can be.Drawing on science, philosophy, literature and the arts, and touching on aspects of life as diverse as language, work, school, chess, speed-dating, art, video games, psychiatry and the law, The Most Human Human shows that that far from being a threat to our humanity, computers provide a better means than ever before of understanding what it is.