Books about the societal impacts of artificial intelligence and the ethical questions it raises are a dime a dozen, so it is always worth asking: does this book do anything differently? In the case of ‘Machines Behaving Badly: The Morality of AI’ (The History Press, £20, ISBN 9780750999366), the answer is yes, thanks to the author’s decades entrenched in the community from which AI has sprung.
The first third or so of ‘Machines Behaving Badly’ examines the people and companies developing AI technologies. This is packed with nuggets of little-known information. It is not much known, for instance, just how small the group of people building AI is (“There may never have been a planet-wide revolution before which was driven by such a small pool of people”).
Walsh paints this community with more than broad strokes and statistics. He talks in revealing detail about the uncomfortable sexism and philosophies entrenched in the community: objectivism, techno-libertarianism...