Deus is about the evolution of Machine as successor to Humankind as god's steward of the Earth. The book is grounded generally in science, philosophy, and religion; specifically, the computing and cognitive sciences; and precisely, the field of artificial intelligence, or AI. Upon that ground, the book builds a description of a machine that is not just intelligent but also self-conscious, emotional, and free-willed.
You used to hear a lot of grandiose claims about AI. World chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov was beaten by an IBM supercomputer, and machines would soon surpass humans in intelligence, it was claimed by some. The Japanese government spent a billion dollars on one project to make it happen.
It didn’t happen, but that didn’t stop the development of intelligence in machines. AI research simply went underground, and has ever since been quietly incorporated into the “ordinary” programs we use every day, without fanfare, without hype.
There is still no machine that rivals Homo sapiens in overall intelligence, but today there are machines that far exceed human intellectual capacity in specific domains, from games to engineering to art, and the number of domains is growing exponentially big and exponentially fast.
The disappearance of AI from front stage was good insofar as it allowed machines to develop in the right way; that is, through an evolutionary process, which is the only way for something of such complexity to develop. This was the crucial point missed by AI’s early acolytes. But AI’s disappearance from view was bad insofar as we lost not only control but also sight of the development of the intelligent machine. We could see the development of machine intelligence, but we could not see the development of the intelligent machine.
This book takes the leap, and after describing the evolutionary development of intelligence in machines it goes on to describe the emotional, intellectual, and ethical attributes of what is no less than an emergent new life form. It asks the Big Question that can only be asked if you accept the very possibility of the new life form: Will it be serpent or savior?
The question is answered in the book’s title. “Deus ex Machina sapiens” is intended to mean “God Emerging From the Intelligent Machine.” The author confesses to having never studied Latin and to have concocted the title from two known Latin phrases: “Deus ex Machina” and “Homo sapiens.” The concoction could be grammatically incorrect. The author be pleased to be corrected.
