DAVID LEINWEBER is former head of The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Computational Research Division's Center for Innovative Financial Technology, and author of Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets

About Rage, he wrote:

"When the crowd at ComicCon anticipates the ‘Rise of Our Artificially Intelligent Robot Overlords,’ you can discount this as the opinions of a bunch of people with swords in Ewok suits.

When you hear that a crowd of world-class technologists and scientists, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Bill Joy and Stephen Hawking, worries very publicly that advanced AI and robotic technologies could pose an existential threat to humanity - trouble on the scale of climate change, bioplague and large asteroids - you really have to wonder what’s going on.

Rob’s book is a guide to how we got here, conceptually and historically. There are some impressive errors. Reading faces turns out to be more subtle than reading zip codes. Who knew? The growing wave of functional++ AI systems is leveraged by the persistence of Moore’s Law and learns its function from ever bigger and varied data.

Rage Inside the Machine appreciates the successes of AI, but does warn that incomprehensibly complex data driven systems are not easily corrected, and can make major mistakes.

Someday, our Robot Overlords will read this book. Hey guys, no offense, eh?”