"This colorful page-turner puts artificial intelligence into a human perspective. Through the lives of Geoff Hinton and other major players, Metz explains this transformative technology and makes the quest thrilling."
—Walter Isaacson, author of The Code Breaker
Recipient of starred reviews in both Kirkus and Library Journal
THE UNTOLD TECH STORY OF OUR TIME
What does it mean to be smart? To be human? What do we really want from life and the intelligence we have, or might create?
With deep and exclusive reporting, across hundreds of interviews, New York Times Silicon Valley journalist Cade Metz brings you into the rooms where these questions are being answered. Where an extraordinarily powerful new artificial intelligence has been built into our biggest companies, our social discourse, and our daily lives, with few of us even noticing.
Long dismissed as a technology of the distant future, artificial intelligence was a project consigned to the fringes of the scientific community. Then two researchers changed everything. One was a sixty-four-year-old computer science professor who didn’t drive and didn’t fly because he could no longer sit down—but still made his way across North America for the moment that would define a new age of technology. The other was a thirty-six-year-old neuroscientist and chess prodigy who laid claim to being the greatest game player of all time before vowing to build a machine that could do anything the human brain could do.
They took two very different paths to that lofty goal, and they disagreed on how quickly it would arrive. But both were soon drawn into the heart of the tech industry. Their ideas drove a new kind of arms race, spanning Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and OpenAI, a new lab founded by Silicon Valley kingpin Elon Musk. But some believed that China would beat them all to the finish line.
Genius Makers dramatically presents the fierce conflict between national interests, shareholder value, the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and the very human concerns about privacy, security, bias, and prejudice. Like a great Victorian novel, this world of eccentric, brilliant, often unimaginably yet suddenly wealthy characters draws you into the most profound moral questions we can ask. And like a great mystery, it presents the story and facts that lead to a core, vital question:
How far will we let it go?

一部人类记忆简史
信息膨胀VS数据丢失
互联网时代，我们怎样保证记忆不会消失？谁决定你能看到什么？有限的注意力应该用来关注哪些信息？
◎ 编辑推荐
☆ 记忆不仅关于过去，还能塑造未来。谁控制过去谁就控制未来。
☆ 从文字产生到印刷书籍，再到数字记忆，存储技术的发展使我们面临很多新的旧的问题：
数据到底属于谁的？
我们如何面对信息膨胀，又如何看待数据消失？
谁决定我们看到哪些信息？
集体失忆会造成怎样的后果？
我们如何保证记忆的真实性、权威性？
☆ 面对不可预测的未来，我们需要记忆新范式，也需要新的基础教育，学会对数字信息保持审慎和责任感。
◎ 内容简介
写在泥板、石碑、莎草纸、手抄本上的记忆可以保存数千年。写在网络上的记忆平均存在的时长只有100天。网络平台一旦关闭，我们的回忆、爱好、生活感悟、学习资料都会消失。
一代代人积累的记忆成为人类区别于其他物种的进化优势：知识和文化。如今我们却面临一个悖论：数据不断膨胀，也在不断丢失；信息触手可及，我们却记不住任何知识。
在本书中，作者探索了从史前时代至今人类是如何记忆的，提醒我们数据存储不是记忆，引导我们思考：在互联网时代的数据洪流中，有限的注意力应该用来记住哪些记忆？我们应该以怎样的态度处理膨胀的信息？消失的记录会对未来产生怎样的影响？以及谁来决定哪些信息可以传播和流传至后世。
◎ 名人推荐
如果我们要思考一千年或三千年后的事，那最好问问自己，怎样才能保证现在创造的数字设备在未来还能读取。我们毫不犹豫地把数据存储在这些数字设备中，但它们有可能是个信息黑洞。
——温特·瑟夫（Vint Cerf），谷歌副总裁兼首席互联网顾问，互联网之父之一
本书的目的是提醒我们严肃思考当下的数据洪流如何影响我们的未来。
——《科学》（Science）
对档案进行数字化的技术使我们能够轻易地改写过去，本书是一本包罗万象的作品。
——《自然》（Nature）
这本有关数字思维的书让我们每个人都认识到人类集体记忆的历史和复杂性，这一点非常重要，可以媲美奥利佛·萨克斯。
——布鲁斯特·卡利（Brewster Kahle），互联网档案馆创始人
我们这个时代的悖论之一就是信息触手可及，我们却记不住任何东西。后代人会怎样看待我们说过的话和做过的事？本书要回答的就是这个问题。艾比·拉齐姆多年的反思使她的文章优雅、清晰，在书中阐明了我们这个时代遇到的一系列问题：我们越来越依赖搜索，而不是去记住信息。
——特德·威德默（Ted Widmer），布朗大学约翰·卡特·布朗图书馆前馆长
数字记忆给我们带来了新的挑战，而本书提供了启发性的见解和令人信服的论据，使我们能够找到新的理论和方法来解决这一迫在眉睫的挑战。
——莎拉·托马斯（Sareh Thomas），哈佛大学图书馆副总裁

In the spirit of Nickel and Dimed, a necessary and revelatory expose of the invisible human workforce that powers the web—and that foreshadows the true future of work. Hidden beneath the surface of the web, lost in our wrong-headed debates about AI, a new menace is looming. Anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri team up to unveil how services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing "ghost work" make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, designing engine parts, and much more. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this “ghost economy,” and that number is growing. They usually earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or none. There are no labor laws to govern this kind of work, and these latter-day assembly lines draw in—and all too often overwork and underpay—a surprisingly diverse range of workers: harried young mothers, professionals forced into early retirement, recent grads who can’t get a toehold on the traditional employment ladder, and minorities shut out of the jobs they want. Gray and Suri also show how ghost workers, employers, and society at large can ensure that this new kind of work creates opportunity—rather than misery—for those who do it.