麻豆传媒

In poorer countries, charging your phone can involve walking miles (Image: Yannis Behrakis/Reuters/Corbis)

CHANGE is in the air; what better time to consider humanity鈥檚 end 鈥� and its possible salvation?

Any artificial intelligence that makes better versions of itself will rapidly outcompete humans 鈥� the so-called 鈥渢echnological singularity鈥�. But will it 鈥渨ant鈥� to? Can AI 鈥渨ant鈥� anything? by Murray Shanahan runs through various scenarios, not all apocalyptic.

Back in the present, Jim Rogers鈥檚 (St. Martin鈥檚 Press, $26.99) points out that 1.2 billion people still don鈥檛 have electricity. But bringing power to the poorest should be easy: there is no old infrastructure in the way. And solving the energy problems of sub-Saharan Africa will provide a blueprint for weaning the developed world off oil. Rogers ran Duke Energy, the largest electric power company in the US, for 7 years; now the elite take note of him.

Big science and big engineering have adapted well to today鈥檚 asymmetric conflicts 鈥� too well for Andrew Cockburn鈥檚 taste. lays bare the political and moral consequences of leveraging technology to address the amorphous dreads of intelligence-starved diplomats. Pre-emption as a strategy comes under fire (as it were), as does the idea of fighting wars with remote cameras that are, according to one veteran, 鈥渘o better than looking at Google Earth through a straw鈥�.

The more virtual our lives become, the more we take craft seriously. Colin McGinn鈥檚 (MIT Press, $24.95/拢17.95) provides the scientific argument for craft, linking various human tics, habits and anxieties to our ability to manipulate the physical world. Singularity enthusiasts take note: human intelligence (the only one we know much about) has had hundreds of thousands of years to become very odd indeed. Copying it will be hard.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淧ondering the fall鈥�