What to make of this book? It was a fairly interesting read, despite several glaring flaws.
The subtitle,"How humans will become as irrelevant as cockroaches" was somewhat misleading. The author does not think that humans will become irrelevant so much as obsolete. That is, he thinks that artificial intelligence will ultimately cater to us night and day, satisfy our every material need and solve all of our most pressing problems.
The author makes a pretty good case that the rise of artificial intelligence will lead to technological unemployment, starting with the elimination of the jobs of truck drivers by autonomous self driving trucks. From there, thanks to machine vision, he thinks that many or most human jobs will be eliminated or rendered obsolete by the end of the 2030s.
One of the problems I have with the book is that the writing style is flabby. The author uses far more words than is necessary to make his case. A good editor could probably have reduced the size of this book by 25% or more by eliminating unnecessary verbiage.
For example, the author, in giving a hypothetical example of aliens from outerspace interviewing the public, is not satisfied with simply saying that they will interview "everyone." Instead, he has to give a long, bulleted list (the author is very fond of bulleted lists) of virtually every type of person he could think of– janitors, ditchdiggers, people living in slums, doctors, lawyers, fast food workers, conservatives, liberals, et cetera -- this list stretches on for nearly two full pages.
Similarly, the author is not satisfied with merely stating that artificial intelligence will help us with all of our problems; he must include another long, bulleted list naming those problems, as if we don't know what they are already (to a large degree, the book reads as if it was written for fifth-graders).
In discussing the plight of truck drivers, the author is not satisfied with saying the media will ignore the drivers' complaints, but he has to unnecessarily bring politics into the matter by naming well-known conservative commentators (but not liberals).
The weak writing is a surprise, considering that this is not the author's first book. Perhaps the better part of being a good writer is having a good editor, but the author obviously failed in this regard, which is surprising, since, as a multimillionaire, he could certainly have afforded to hire the best editors.
A somewhat more serious criticism is it the book offers a somewhat myopic point of view. For example, the author discusses artificial intelligence at great length but practically ignores nanotechnology, which will prove to be either a fantastic boon or a fantastic threat. He also completely ignores the considerable existential threat that super artificial intelligence may present to mankind, as explored in books such as those by Nick Bostrom.
In Chapter 10 - "Why Are There No Extraterrestrials?" the author hypothesizes that the reason we have never made contact with extraterrestrials is that they, too, once they become advanced enough, will have developed advanced artificial intelligence and will then enter into a "quiescent" state in which all of their needs will be satisfied and they will have no desire to explore or conquer the rest of the universe.
This flies in the face of Ray Kurzweil's theory that, as artificial intelligence advances, it will seek to expand and spread outwards into the rest of the universe, eventually "saturating" it with intelligence. Perhaps the author does not agree with Kurzweil's theory, but he has surely heard of it, and the fact that he makes no mention or refutation of it is peculiar.
In summary, I find this an interesting book, but one that, because of its flaws, is much less than what it could have been.
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![The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches by [Marshall Brain]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51h0zg5TBiL._SY346_.jpg)
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