The Innovators: a counterpoint

I finished listening to The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (Unabridged) by Walter Isaacson, narrated by Dennis Boutsikaris on my Audible app. Try Audible and get it free: https://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B00M9KA2ZM&source_code=AFAORWS04241590G4

Walter Isaacson is my favorite biographer, but in The Innovators Isaacson departs a little from his focus on a singular genius, in order to extract the zeitgeist of the digital revolution.  In brush strokes evoking the genesis, development, & future of the digital revolution, Isaacson presents an argument for the primacy of symbiotic relationships, teamwork, and evolutionary bootstrapping in fostering the innovation and spread of digital tools that will continue to augment human capabilities instead of the nightmare of robots replacing us.

Isaacson contextualizes the philosophies, breakthroughs in hardware, software, networking, and Artificial Intelligence , as well as individuals and teams who have made significant contributions. He presents a view skeptical of visions of Terminators and super intelligence, and emphasizes more of a human-machine partnership, with humanity providing the creativity, hopes, and dreams to the partnership moving forward.

Isaacson only briefly addresses the premise of futurists such as Ray Kurzweill, Yuval Noah Hariri, and Max Tegmark, that within a few decades a highly competent super intelligence will evolve, sparked by advances in processing power and the reverse engineering of the human brain. Because of this limitation, Isaacson 's work shoukd be supplemented. Life 3.0 presents a plausible scenario in the first chapter of a superintelligence escaping a pandora's box that is must reading. How To Create a Mind provides a layman's technical overview of the development of AI alongside the reverse engineering of the human brain. Homo Deus, similar to Life 3.0, places the development of AI in an biological and post-biological evolutionary context.