The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity

1. Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing? 2. What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness? 3. What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?

a “futuristic” society of human-machine hybrids where we’ve traded our cherished qualities of intuition, empathy, and creativity and the soul-stirring bonds of love, intimacy, and sexual conception for the convenience of AI that creates our music, poetry, and art, and virtual realities that replace genuine relationships and human contact.