"Few books so artfully blend the optimism of Kurzweil with the caution of Bostrom with the pragmatism of Mollick." (Linus Caldwell, Alphaverse Capital)

In classical Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity before being damned for all eternity. The moral of the story: the gift of scientific progress and technology is a double-edged sword.

If the hype is to be believed, humanity is on the cusp of a technological breakthrough of Promethean impact: Artificial Intelligence. Google’s Sundar Pichai claims that the impact of AI will be “more profound than fire and electricity.”

Critics, however, are divided on the prospects. Will AI bring about a techno-capitalist utopia where scarcity is eradicated, disease and aging are conquered, and the deepest mysteries of the universe finally revealed? Or will it create a dystopia of the sort familiar from countless science fiction classics: The Matrix, Terminator, Dune, or 2001: A Space Odyssey?

To illustrate the knife-edge on which humanity finds itself, Adopting AI starts with seven scenarios, each of which has a catastrophic and a utopian outcome. The authors invite the reader, at the beginning and end of the book, to assess where they think humanity is, and in which direction it might be heading.

In the authors’ view, the answers aren’t predetermined by technology but depend on the choices individuals, organizations, and societies make in the coming years. Paradoxically, the more powerful the technology, the more important human reason and moral judgment become.

Gibbons and Healy argue that successfully and safely adopting AI means recognizing just how different this transformational technology is from the traditional computer systems with which we’re all familiar. In their provocative take, AI is best thought of not as a technology at all, but as an intelligence: the smartest, dumbest, strangest colleague you’ve ever had.

The principles for People-first AI adoption flow from the fundamental nature of AI: unpredictable, opaque, and prone to bias. Yet this description could just as easily be about human intelligence as AI. Adopting and adapting to such intelligence requires a bottom-up, experimental approach, with ethics at the center, that the authors call adaptive adoption.

Gibbons and Healy tread a fine line between hope and despair, utopia and dystopia, neither sugarcoating the risks of AI, nor underplaying the transformational opportunities. Blending practical insights and entertaining anecdotes, this is a panoramic tour of AI’s potential uses and abuses, from the office cubicle to the courtroom, the science lab to the artist’s studio.

Above all, Adopting AI is a practical handbook for navigating the intelligence transition for executives and organizational leaders, but also citizens and parents, following the Promethean path through what the authors term “the intelligence transition.”