Superintelligence

Really great book. For a while I'd been searching for a book that really goes into detail on the possibilities of superintelligent AI, and this book was perfect for that. If you're not into computer science and math/stat, you can probably skip the beginning where he goes through the history. The middle of the book where he talks through the different risks and how we might address them were fascinating and I think everyone would enjoy that section. The last 3 chapters were pretty boring, but there were still some significant insights in there. I'd recommend skipping the last 3 chapters unless you are REALLY into this subject (like me).

A few thoughts:
1. Very difficult topic to write about. There's so much uncertainty involved that it's almost impossible to even agree on the basic assumptions of the book.
2. The writing is incredibly thorough, given the assumptions, but also hard to understand. You need to follow the arguments closely and reread sections to fully understand their implications.

Overall, interesting and thought-provoking book even though the basic assumptions are debatable

P.S. (6 months later) Looking back on this book I think a major theme is encapsulated by the story of the AI Alice, the paperclip maximizer. In this story, Alice is charged with collecting as many paperclips as she can. She goes to achieves this goal by transforming the entire universe into a paperclip factory, and in the process destroying all life in the universe. (For the full story see wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer) Now the main lesson is that what we consider human values won't spontaneously arise in machines. And as shown in the story of Alice this could be dangerous for humans. Nick visits this theme again and again throughout his book. We need to be very careful and teach machines human values and not assume that these values will arise automatically.

The book gives a good overview of issues arising with the creation artificial intelligence. After the first few chapters it becomes quite technical but still a fascinating read. I'd recommend this to anyone with an interest in AI.