Susan Schneider has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is Artificial You.
Artificial You
Summary
A sober-minded philosophical exploration of what AI can and cannot achieve Humans may not be Earth’s most intelligent species for much longer: the world champions of chess, Go, and Jeopardy! are now all AIs. Given the rapid pace of progress in AI, many predict that it could advance to human-level intelligence within the next several decades. From there, it could quickly outpace human intelligence. What do these developments mean for the future of the mind? In Artificial You, Susan Schneider says that it is inevitable that AI will take intelligence in new directions but urges that it is up to us to carve out a sensible path forward. As AI technology turns inward, reshaping the brain, as well as outward, potentially creating machine minds, it is crucial to beware. Homo sapiens, as mind designers, will be playing with "tools" they do not understand how to use: the self, the mind, and consciousness. Schneider argues that an insufficient grasp of the nature of these entities could undermine the use of AI and brain enhancement technology, bringing about the demise or suffering of conscious beings. To flourish, we must grasp the philosophical issues lying beneath the algorithms. At the heart of her exploration is a sober-minded discussion of what AI can truly achieve: Can robots really be conscious? Can we merge with AI, as tech leaders like Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil suggest? Is the mind just a program? Examining these thorny issues, Schneider proposes ways we can test for machine consciousness, questions whether consciousness is an unavoidable byproduct of sophisticated intelligence, and considers the overall dangers of creating machine minds.
©2019 Susan Schneider (P)2019 Princeton University Press
Fire In My Ears
Summary
Set at first in late 19th century Eastern Europe, Fire in My Ears by Susan Schneider is a coming-of-age tale that begins with a beautiful young woman who makes a tragic far-reaching decision and the result is three generations of pain, disappointing and bitter struggle for happiness. We follow Mary as her adoring father loves her perhaps too much, as she is nearly jilted by the handsome Avram, and as she brazenly makes her way by train through Europe. We continue with her across the English Channel and see her settle in the east end of London and then travel steerage with three young children to America. We find ourselves finally in a mid-century American suburb amid all of Mary's damaged and miserable descendants. Mary's story is told by her grown up granddaughter Sarah who learned all her grandmother's lessons from nightly tales entrusted to her when she was a nine-year-old child in their shared bedroom. The book alternates between those stories that sometimes delight but often terrify Sarah, and the daily events of her own life. She listens intently for clues to understand the mean-spirited love she observes in the three generations of her family that gather at her house every Sunday. This is a matriarch's tale of a haunting past, dangerous choices and terrible secrets. It explores relationships seen through the eyes of both an old woman and her precious grandchild. Mary's determination to save her favorite grandchild from her own unhappy existence is perhaps her only noble gesture and it elevates her to the heroic heights her benighted beauty never could.
©2013 Susan Schneider (P)2015 Susan Schneider