I Spite Read Superintelligence And Don't Regret It

Not my usual reading lane, I picked this up because a coworker wouldn’t stop talking about it and I wanted to be able to argue back with something more than a vibe. It opens with the fable of the sparrows deciding to raise an owl egg so the owl can protect the nest, and that little parable does more work than most of the technical chapters that follow, it’s the one image from this book that’s actually stuck with me months later.

Bostrom is a philosopher, not a science writer, and it shows. The prose is dense in a way that made me reread paragraphs, one reviewer joked you should drink every time he says superintelligence and I believe it would put you under the table by chapter three. I disagreed with a decent chunk of his core assumptions even after finishing, which somebody else described as spite reading, powering through specifically to keep arguing with the book in your head, and that’s exactly the mode I ended up in.

Where it earns the four stars is the sheer thoroughness of the risk cataloguing, paths to superintelligence, containment strategies, the ways each containment strategy could plausibly fail. It’s less a warning and more an audit. I did try the audiobook for a stretch on a flight and switched back to the page, the narrator has this measured, almost villainous calm that works against the material instead of for it, dry material needs a livelier reader, not a soothing one.

Four stars, not five, because it’s overlong and repetitive in the middle third in a way one more editing pass would have fixed. But it changed how seriously I take the topic, which is more than most nonfiction manages.