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Bluebird has landed two more books from Solve for Happy (Bluebird) author and entrepreneur Mo Gawdat.
Publisher Carole Tonkinson acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Julian Alexander at The Soho Agency, acting for Michael Carlisle at Inkwell.
The first book, Scary Smart, “an urgent and eye-opening look into the future of our species in the face of Artificial Intelligence”, will be published on 30th September 2021. The second title, That Little Voice in Your Head, a practical look at neuroscience and happiness, will follow in spring 2022.
Bluebird said: “Over the last 75 years AI has progressed at an almost exponential rate, with current scientific predictions estimating that by 2049 AI will be one billion times more intelligent than the smartest human. In Scary Smart, Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer of GoogleX, outlines the actions we must take to safeguard the future of our species. Gawdat, who helped to write some of the early code used in modern AI, explores how we must accept what he calls ‘The Three Inevitables’: AI will happen; AI will be smarter than humans; and bad things will happen as a result.
“He highlights that our own arrogance, greed, violence and division as a society has informed AI. We are the ‘parent’ and ‘AI’ is the child, learning its values from us. Unwittingly, with every like of a hate-filled post, we are teaching AI that these views are acceptable. Scary Smart will enable us to understand how we can better educate machine intelligence through our own actions so that it will work with us and not against us in the future.”
Tonkinson commented: “I asked Mo what we should do about AI and the dystopian future that is being described as awaiting us. Instead of answering my question over lunch, he wrote this compelling, game-changing book. We’re awash in crises at the moment, but I’m convinced that in some ways the development of AI is the most critical emergency we’re facing and there is no better guide than Mo Gawdat to help us understand and grapple with what is to come.”
Mo Gawdat added: “Working with Carole and Bluebird on Solve for Happy was incredibly fruitful. We're just a very good team together. The support Bluebird has given me no doubt made the book the bestseller that it became. I hope that together we will be able to engage the readers in the timely and important messages of those two new books.”