Future Minds: The Rise of Intelligence from the Big Bang to the End of the Universe

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About Future Minds: The Rise Of Intelligence From The Big

Product Description For readers of Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking, the book readers have acclaimed as "A mega-comprehensive outlook at intelligence as convincing as it is surprising" and "A truly breathtaking forecast on the future of intelligence." With the ongoing advancement of AI and other technologies, our world is becoming increasingly intelligent. From chatbots to innovations in brain-computer interfaces to the possibility of superintelligences leading to the Singularity later this century, our reality is being transformed before our eyes. This is commonly seen as the natural result of progress, but what if there’s more to it than that? What if intelligence is an inevitability, an underlying property of the universe?   In Future Minds, Richard Yonck challenges our assumptions about intelligence—what it is, how it came to exist, its place in the development of life on Earth and possibly throughout the cosmos. Taking a Big History perspective—over the 14 billion years from the Big Bang to the present and beyond—he draws on recent developments in physics and complexity theory to explore the questions: Why do pockets of increased complexity develop, giving rise to life, intelligence, and civilization? How will it grow and change throughout this century, transforming both technology and humanity? As we expand outward from our planet, will we discover other forms of intelligence, or will we conclude we are destined to go it alone? Any way we look at it, the nature of intelligence in the universe is becoming a central concern for humanity. Ours. Theirs. And everything in between.   Review “ Yonck’s capacity for weaving together a tapestry of issues that have shaped and will shape intelligence is mind-blowing. While you might wonder how the Big Bang and the end of the universe are relevant to choices you make today, they are. Future Minds shows how we need to re-think business, society, and our lives based on the transformational future of intelligence.”—Cindy Frewen, FAIA, PhD, Urban Futurist, former chair of the Association of Professional Futurists   “Will artificial intelligence leave us behind like roadkill? Or help us build revolutionary new futures for humanity?  In this important book, Richard Yonck hunts the idea of intelligence across all of space and time in order to help us understand the deeper significance of AI.”—David Christian, founder of The Big History Project   “Breaking free from the anthropomorphism that defines so much work on intelligence, Yonck makes a space in our minds for the ancient evolutionary world of the non-human thought and a futuristic world of hybrid human-machine mentation. Taking us beyond our cultural obsession with the Turing Test with its armies of chess- and Go-playing manqués, neural network classifiers, and sinister face detectors, Yonck follows the scent of mind to its roots in the origin of matter and its future in the extended phenotype.”—David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems, Santa Fe Institute   “ In the tradition of Lovelock, Prigogine, and Hawking, Richard Yonck takes the reader on a deep dive into the nature of intelligence and its evolution. Laying out the case for an almost inevitable rise of super-intelligence, whether artificial or via merging of human and artificial minds, Yonck takes us into the distant future when we might hope for a role in spreading such intelligence into the galaxy and beyond. An exhilarating ride.”—Glen Hiemstra, founder of Futurist.com   “In Richard Yonck's fascinating Future Minds, we rocket through the origins of intelligence and witness—close up—the inevitable melding of biological and silicon minds. This book will leave you spellbound and more curious than ever about what the future has in store.”—Alexandra Levit, author of Humanity Works   “Using the lens of Big History, Richard Yonck paints a fascinating picture of the rise of intelligence in nature. It grows out of the dust of pr