Thinking Machines: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence--and Where It's Taking Us Next

Driverless cars, for sure. But pilotless airplanes? Machines that will replace doctors and corporate managers? And robots that can out-think the most brilliant human?The popular term “robots“—first used in a Czech science fiction play staged in 1920—refers to machines that embody what scientists call artificial intelligence (AI). In an outstanding survey of the field, British science journalist Luke Dormehl delves deeply into the past, present, and future of humankind’s attempts to create machines capable of learning and decision-making on their own. His book, Thinking Machines: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence and Where It’s Taking Us Next, serves up the background readers need to understand why such luminaries as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have warned us that AI poses a grave threat to our future as a species—while others including Ray Kurzweil, a pioneer in the field, predict a new Golden Age.Hawking fears that the evolution of artificial intelligence will make the human race irrelevant. “It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate,” he said. “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”With a somewhat different take on the subject, Musk asserts that human and machine will inevitably merge, with devices such as brain implants to increase our intelligence. However, he is fearful of Artificial General Intelligence: AI that is “smarter than the smartest human on earth, which would present a “dangerous situation.”Kurzweil famously speaks about the “singularity,” the time (which he puts at 2045) when robots will surpass the intellectual capacity of the most brilliant human being and usher in boundless new possibilities. Hardly fearful of the threat perceived by Hawking and Musk, Kurzweil believes the problem will be solvable. “If AI becomes an existential threat,” he wrote in TIME magazine, “it won’t be the first one. Humanity was introduced to existential risk when I was a child sitting under my desk during the civil defense drills of the 1950s. Since then we have encountered comparable specters, like the possibility of a bioterrorist creating a new virus for which humankind has no defense.” Not to mention climate change and the threat of an asteroid collision or an unstoppable pandemic. “Technology,” Kurzweil adds, “has always been a double edged sword, since fire kept us warm but also burned down our villages.”Futuristic predictions notwithstanding, virtually all observers fear the near-term impact of AI, and that’s nothing new. In fact, beginning in the late 1940s, public concern mounted about the potential of automation to displace humans from their jobs. The topic was widely discussed in the 1950s and beyond; today’s preoccupation with robots in manufacturing, driverless cars, and computer algorithms that are putting lawyers out of work is merely the latest iteration of the problem. The trend has simply accelerated in recent decades. There’s no ignoring it now.Dormehl traces the emergence of this trend through the work of individual scientists, many of whose names will be familiar to anyone with knowledge of the history of the computer industry—John von Neumann, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, and Marvin Minsky, among others. The story as the author tells it is highly engaging, tracing the development of AI from the 19th-century work of Ada Lovelace (Lord Byron’s daughter) and Charles Babbage on the latter’s proposed Analytical Engine, which was to be the world’s first general-purpose computer. (It was never built.) Along the way, Dormehl explores the unsteady evolution of AI both in theory and in practice and describes many of the field’s current applications, some of them surprising: for example, robots displacing research scientists in discovering likely prospects for life-saving drugs, and IBM’s Watson, the Jeopardy! champion, turning chef. He turns a skeptical eye toward some of the more ambitious goals of the field, such as the use of computers to mimic the structure and functions of the human brain. This is an amazing story, and an important one.In the final analysis, Dormehl writes that “speculating about where Artificial General Intelligence could potentially take us [as Hawking, Musk, and Kurzweil have done] is interesting, but ultimately the stuff of science fiction for now.” Clearly, it makes more sense to concern ourselves with how to provide meaningful employment to all the millions of people displaced by AI from their jobs in the years ahead.

If you don't know much about the subject, this book will give a quick, high level overview. If you have even a general (non-technical) interest in AI, you probably already know pretty much everything this book covers, including most of the anecdotes.

The book reviews some of the main applications that are classified as Artificial Intelligence. Unfortunately, the reviews are quite superficial. Don't expect to understand how the algorithms embedded in these applications work. Also, the book presents no new ideas.

This is an outstanding book, and I don't get why anyone would diss it in a review. It's very well-written, very well-researched, full of interesting content and a really excellent introduction to the AI past, present and upcoming future. In contrast to some of the other books I've read on the topic, it seems more firmly grounded and less focussed on radical future speculation and philosophy. (N.B. I haven't quite finished this one but am more than half-way through it, and it's wonderful, so far.)

A must-read if you want to know how AI and VR will impact our lives. It's a fun read as well as an informative one.

Interesting survey; worthwhile. Covers a lot of ground. Easy to read. Recommended for anyone who wants a good introduction to AI.

This is an excellent book. Helps the average reader understand an emergent technology.

An excellent introduction for those unfamiliar with this critical direction in computing....highly recommended!