God AI: Boom or doom? What to expect when machines outsmart us is the book that Toby Walsh wished never to write. A professor of the loud shirt variety and the head of UNSW Sydney’s AI institute, Walsh is sounding the alarm that superintelligent AI might be closer than we think.Walsh believes artificial general intelligence (AGI), or “artificial godlike intelligence” as he prefers, will be a panacea capable of fixing everything from cancer to climate change. He says it would be immoral not to pursue it with gusto. But how to weigh this against the possible total extermination of humanity?To his credit, Walsh acknowledges the significant proportion of experts who consider the current technology inadequate. To paraphrase author and tech critic Cory Doctorow: no matter how selectively you breed horses, they will never birth a steam engine. Yet his case relies mightily on tech bro predictions, although Sam Altman, Elon Musk and their competition have demonstrated their opinions to be irredeemably compromised by self-interest. They present this moment as a bifurcation in which you’re either on the bus or left behind. Walsh also explains that nobody knows what’s really possible, that probabilities and dates posing as hard data are all made up. This permits God AI to sometimes lose itself in speculation.Walsh’s framing of AI is a deeper issue. Superintelligence is presented as alien, unmoored from present reality. Walsh’s comparison with climate change is insightful, but not in the way he intends. What begins as a broad challenge for humanity is really an amplifier of present-day crises: a creature born of our present, not a bolt from the blue.Walsh is deeply knowledgeable of the present. He frequently discusses the costs of AI: in carbon emissions, water usage and plundering of intellectual property. Yet through it all, his techno-optimism remains resilient. A hyperabundant post-work utopia where universal basic income “could liberate” us all may be just around the corner. He never asks why the AI giants would be competing and investors emptying their pockets to bring about a future in which money is meaningless. In the words of another commentator: if we’re building utopia then whose utopia is it?In closing, Walsh weighs the claim that AGI might become a deity. It might, but we never learn where Walsh stands on some of Silicon Valley’s more outlandish predictions. In the same breath, he explains how today AI props up dictators and expands surveillance capitalism. It is in these latter, more sober moments, when Walsh shakes off the intoxicating hype, that God AI is its deepest and most original. As Walsh understands AI as well as anyone in the country, we need his help navigating the now.Black Inc, 240pp, $36.99Black Inc is a Schwartz company