Below, Kevin Roose shares five key insights from his new book, The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence.

Roose is an award-winning technology journalist, bestselling author, and cofounder of Machine Gods Media. He previously spent a decade as a technology columnist for The New York Times, where he co-created and cohosted the popular podcast Hard Fork. He now cohosts Machine Gods, an AI-focused podcast produced in partnership with NPR.

For years, the world’s leading AI researchers have raced to build a technology that many of them fear. But the finish line keeps moving as AI becomes more capable. The truth is, we’re already living in the early, imperfect years of artificial general intelligence, and our institutions are dangerously unprepared for what comes next.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Roose himself—in the Next Big Idea app, or buy the book.

This is, in some sense, the founding paradox of the whole AGI story. You’d assume the people building AI are true believers who expect it will do amazing things, like cure cancer and end poverty. And some of them are. But a surprising number of key figures in this race got into AI because they were terrified. They read the arguments about what a superintelligent machine might do to humanity, took them seriously, and concluded that if this thing was going to be built no matter what, it had better be built by people who were scared of it and would take the appropriate precautions.

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