About Cade Metz
Cade Metz is a reporter with The New York Times, covering artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality, and other emerging areas. Genius Makers is his first book. Previously, he was a senior staff writer with Wired magazine and the U.S. editor of The Register, one of Britain’s leading science and technology news sites.
A native of North Carolina and a graduate of Duke University, Metz, 48, works in The New York Times’ San Francisco bureau and lives across the bay with his wife Taylor and two daughters.
Where to find Cade Metz:
Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World
What does it mean to be smart? To be human? What do we really want from life and the intelligence we have or might create?
With deep and exclusive reporting, across hundreds of interviews, New York Times Silicon Valley journalist Cade Metz brings you into the rooms where these questions are being answered. Where an extraordinarily powerful new artificial intelligence has been built into our biggest companies, our social discourse, and our daily lives, with few of us even noticing.
Long dismissed as a technology of the distant future, artificial intelligence was a project consigned to the fringes of the scientific community. Then two researchers changed everything. One was a sixty-four-year-old computer science professor who didn’t drive and didn’t fly because he could no longer sit down—but still made his way across North America for the moment that would define a new age of technology. The other was a thirty-six-year-old neuroscientist and chess prodigy who laid claim to being the greatest game player of all time before vowing to build a machine that could do anything the human brain could do.
Genius Makers dramatically presents the fierce conflict between national interests, shareholder value, the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and the very human concerns about privacy, security, bias, and prejudice. Like a great Victorian novel, this world of eccentric, brilliant, often unimaginably yet suddenly wealthy characters draws you into the most profound moral questions we can ask. And like a great mystery, it presents the story and facts that lead to a core, vital question:
How far will we let it go?
It is as hard to understand a technological revolution while it is happening as to know what a hurricane will do while the winds are still gaining speed. Through the emergence of technologies now regarded as basic elements of modernity — electric power, the arrival of automobiles and airplanes and now the internet — people have tried, with hit-and-miss success, to assess their future impact.
The most persistent and touching error has been the ever-dashed hope that, as machines are able to do more work, human beings will be freed to do less, and will have more time for culture and contemplation. The greatest imaginative challenge seems to be foreseeing which changes will arrive sooner than expected (computers outplaying chess grandmasters), and which will be surprisingly slow (flying cars). The tech-world saying is that people chronically overestimate what technology can do in a year, and underestimate what it can do in a decade and beyond.
So it inevitably goes with one of this moment’s revolutions, the combination of ever-higher computing speed and vastly more-voluminous data that together are the foundations of artificial intelligence, or A.I. Depending on how you count, the A.I. revolution began about 60 years ago, dating to the dawn of the computer age and a concept called the “Perceptron” — or has just barely begun. Its implications range from utilities already routinized into daily life (like real-time updates on traffic flow) to ominous steps toward “1984”-style perpetual-surveillance states (like China’s facial recognition system, which within one second can match a name to a photo of any person within the country).
Looking back, it’s easy to recognize the damage done by waiting too long to face important choices about technology — or leaving those choices to whatever a private interest might find profitable. These go from the role of the automobile in creating America’s sprawl-suburb landscape to the role of Facebook and other companies in fostering the disinformation society.
“Genius Makers” by an experienced technology reporter at The New York Times, is part of a rapidly growing literature attempting to make sense of the A.I. hurricane we are living through. Cade Metz’s is mainly reportorial, about how we got here; He valuably suggests a framework for the right questions to ask now about A.I. and its use.
“Genius Makers” is about the people who have built the A.I. world — scientists, engineers, linguists, gamers — more than about the technology itself, or its good and bad effects. The fundamental technical debates and discoveries on which A.I. is based are a background to the individual profiles and corporate-drama scenes Metz presents. The longest running, most consequential debate is between proponents of two different approaches to increasing computerized “intelligence,” which can be oversimplified as “thinking like a person” versus “thinking like a machine.”
The first boils down to using “neural networks” — the neurons in this case being computer circuits — that are designed to conduct endless trial-and-error experiments and improve their accuracy as they match their conclusions against real-world data. The second boils down to equipping a computer with detailed sets of rules — rules of syntax and semantics for language translation, rules of syndrome-pattern for medical diagnoses. Much of Metz’s story runs from excitement for neural networks in the early 1960s, to an “A.I. winter” in the 1970s, when that era’s computers proved too limited to do the job, to a recent revival of a neural-network approach toward “deep learning,” which is essentially the result of the faster and more complex self-correction of today’s enormously capable machines.
Metz tells the story of more than a dozen of the world’s A.I. pioneers, of whom two come across most vividly. One is Geoffrey Hinton, an English-born computer scientist now in his mid-70s, who is introduced in the prologue as “The Man Who Didn’t Sit Down.” Because of a back condition, Hinton finds it excruciating to sit in a chair — and he has not done so since 2005. Instead he spends his waking hours standing, walking or lying down. This means, among other things, that he cannot take commercial airplane flights. In one crucial scene of Metz’s tale he is placed on a makeshift bed on the floor of a Gulfstream, and then strapped down for the flight across the Atlantic to an A.I. meeting in London.
The other most prominent figure in Metz’s book is Demis Hassabis, who grew up in London and is now in his mid-40s. He is a former chess prodigy and electronic-games entrepreneur and designer who founded a company called DeepMind, now a leading force in the quest for the grail of A.G.I., or artificial general intelligence.
“Superintelligence was possible and he believed it could be dangerous, but he also believed it was still many years away,” Metz writes of Hassabis. “‘We need to use the downtime, when things are calm, to prepare for when things get serious in the decades to come,’ he has said. ‘The time we have now is valuable, and we need to make use of it.’”
Support this blog by:
- Subscribing to our YouTube Channel.
- Subscribing to our podcast through your favorite podcast app.
- Using our Amazon Affiliate link.