Excerpts: “Where war is considered tantamount to national suicide, surrender may appear the lesser of two evils” (p. xv).

“One could hold, in the formulation of the French writer Romain Rolland, both the ‘pessimism of intellect’ and the ‘optimism of will.’ Where the optimist aspires to assured human control of our affairs, the pessimist sees our condition as determined by forces beyond our control: the laws of nature and the cycles of history” (p. xxvi-xxvii).

“New forms of AI and human responses to them could transform nothing less than the human relationship to reality and to truth, the exploration of knowledge as well as the physical evolution of humanity, the conduct of diplomacy, and the international system” (p. 3).

“And that raises the possibility of a paradigm shift in the primary standard for measuring national strength, which has moved through the centuries from territory, to resources, to capital, to human capital—and now, perhaps, to computing capital” (p. 29).

“…the search still continues for a ‘Grand Unified Theory’ that will reconcile the two separate and incompatible theories vying to explain our existence from opposite ends of reality. These are the cosmic theory (general relativity) and the subatomic theory (quantum mechanics)” (p. 31).

“Quantum mechanics describes the world at the micro-scale, where, as the Harvard physicist Greg Kestin puts it, ‘Nothing is predictable and objects don’t have precise positions until they are observed,’ and general relativity describes the world at a cosmic scale, where everything is predictable, ‘whether or not’ observed” (p. 51).

“Machines may contend that the truest method of classification is to group today’s humans together with other animals, since both are carbon system emergent of evolution and different from silicon systems emergent of engineering” (p. 58).

But another cause of error in our human systems is our individual free will—we are free to make the ‘wrong’ choice. If an AI system decides to remove such errors, it faces two options: Remove us, or remove our free will” (p. 102).

“Articulating strategic principles can set useful bounds on what is conceivable, provide grounds for isolated decisions, and lessen the mental burdens when crisis inevitably arrives” (p. 184).

“To an AI, everything—even the laws of physics—exists along a spectrum of merely relative truth” (p. 195).

“In this light, it must be said forthrightly that, should it appear impossible to realize a regime of reliable technical strategic control, we should prefer a world with no AGI at all to a world in which even one AGI remains unaligned with human values” (p. 203).

Kissinger, Henry A., Craig Mundie, and Eric Schmidt (2024). Genesis – Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirt. New York: Little, Brown and Company.