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A fascinating look at Artificial Intelligence, from its humble Cold War beginnings to the dazzling future that is just around the corner.
When most of us think about Artificial Intelligence, our minds go straight to cyborgs, robots, and sci-fi thrillers where machines take over the world. But the truth is that Artificial Intelligence is already among us. It exists in our smartphones, fitness trackers, and refrigerators that tell us when the milk will expire. In some ways, the future people dreamed of at the World's Fair in the 1960s is already here. We're teaching our machines how to think like humans, and they're learning at an incredible rate. In Thinking Machines, technology journalist Luke Dormehl takes you through the history of AI and how it makes up the foundations of the machines that think for us today. Furthermore, Dormehl speculates on the incredible—and possibly terrifying—future that's much closer than many would imagine. This remarkable book will invite you to marvel at what now seems commonplace and to dream about a future in which the scope of humanity may need to broaden itself to include intelligent machines.
A fascinating look at Artificial Intelligence, from its humble Cold War beginnings to the dazzling future that is just around the corner.
When most of us think about Artificial Intelligence, our minds go straight to cyborgs, robots, and sci-fi thrillers where machines take over the world. But the truth is that Artificial Intelligence is already among us. It exists in our smartphones, fitness trackers, and refrigerators that tell us when the milk will expire. In some ways, the future people dreamed of at the World's Fair in the 1960s is already here. We're teaching our machines how to think like humans, and they're learning at an incredible rate. In Thinking Machines, technology journalist Luke Dormehl takes you through the history of AI and how it makes up the foundations of the machines that think for us today. Furthermore, Dormehl speculates on the incredible—and possibly terrifying—future that's much closer than many would imagine. This remarkable book will invite you to marvel at what now seems commonplace and to dream about a future in which the scope of humanity may need to broaden itself to include intelligent machines.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the bookWhatever Happened to Good Old-Fashioned AI? It was the first thing people saw as they drew close: a shining, stainless steel globe called the Unisphere, rising a full twelve stories into the air. Around it stood dozens of fountains, jetting streams of crystal-clear water into the skies of Flushing Meadows Corona Park, in New York’s Queens borough. At various times during the day, a performer wearing a rocket outfit developed by the US military jetted past the giant globe—showing off man’s ability to rise above any and all challenges.
The year was 1964 and the site, the New York World’s Fair. During the course of the World’s Fair, an estimated 52 million people descended upon Flushing Meadows’ 650 acres of pavilions and public spaces. It was a celebration of a bright present for the United States and a tantalizing glimpse of an even brighter future: one covered with multilane motorways, glittering skyscrapers, moving pavements and underwater communities. Even the possibility of holiday resorts in space didn’t seem out of reach for a country like the United States, which just five years later would successfully send man to the Moon. New York City’s “Master Builder” Robert Moses referred to the 1964 World’s Fair as “the Olympics of Progress.”
Wherever you looked there was some reminder of America’s post-war global dominance. The Ford Motor Company chose the World’s Fair to unveil its latest automobile, the Ford Mustang, which rapidly became one of history’s best-selling cars. New York’s Sinclair Oil Corporation exhibited “Dinoland,” an animatronic recreation of the Mesozoic age, in which Sinclair Oil’s brontosaurus corporate mascot towered over every other prehistoric beast. At the NASA pavilion, fairgoers had the chance to glimpse a fifty-one-foot replica of the Saturn V rocket ship boat-tail, soon to help the Apollo space missions reach the stars. At the Port Authority Building, people lined up to see architects’ models of the spectacular “Twin Towers” of the World Trade Center, which was set to break ground two years later in 1966.
Today, many of these advances evoke a nostalgic sense of technological progress. In all their “bigger, taller, heavier” grandeur, they speak to the final days of an age that was, unbeknownst to attendees of the fair, coming to a close. The Age of Industry was on its way out, to be superseded by the personal computer– driven Age of Information. For those children born in 1964 and after, digits would replace rivets in their engineering dreams. Apple’s Steve Jobs was only nine years old at the time of the New York World’s Fair. Google’s cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, would not be born for close to another decade; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for another ten years after that.
As it turned out, the most forward-looking section of Flushing Meadows Corona Park turned out to be the exhibit belonging to International Business Machines Corporation, better known as IBM. IBM’s mission for the 1964 World’s Fair was to cement computers (and more specifically Artificial Intelligence) in the public consciousness, alongside better-known wonders like space rockets and nuclear reactors. To this end, the company selected the fair as the venue to introduce its new System/360 series of computer mainframes: machines supposedly powerful enough to build the first prototype for a sentient computer.
IBM’s centerpiece at the World’s Fair was a giant, egg-shaped pavilion,...
Reviews-
Starred review from January 1, 2017 A history of artificial intelligence and look at the "dazzling (near) future, the changes that lurk just around the corner, and how they will transform our lives forever."During the 1960s, AI seemed to be coming "out of cinemas and paperback novels and into reality," and then the tide receded. Now it's everywhere, in our iPhones, TVs, cars, and even refrigerators. It's a marvelous story, and technology journalist Dormehl (The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems...and Create More, 2015, etc.) does it justice. After World War II, when computers began calculating thousands and then millions of times faster than a human, enthusiasts predicted talking robots in a few decades. The author dubs this the era of "Good Old-fashioned AI." Sadly, brute-force calculating enabled a computer to play chess brilliantly, but it couldn't recognize a face, something every 2-month-old baby does. As Steven Pinker said, "the main lesson of the first thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard." By the 1980s, funding and media interest had shrunk, but younger scientists turned their attention from programming knowledge one piece at a time to systems that imitate the brain. These "neural networks" employ probability, feedback, potentiation, and inhibition to make sense of data. It works. Computers can't yet think, but they can learn. Google, founded in 1998, was one consequence. The powerful computer named Watson, which easily defeated the best Jeopardy contestants in 2011, succeeded by using analogy and trial and error, not massive stores of facts. This was "deep learning." Computers now recognize faces and the printed word, translate languages, consult other computers, and gather so much information that they can predict our behavior. Not everyone approves. Dormehl lets critics have their say but makes a convincing, often disturbing, but always-entertaining case that that we're in for a wild ride.
COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
February 15, 2017
A few years ago, the question, "Can machines think?" would have been answered simply, no. Even the chess-playing program that could beat the best human player was only following a systematic evaluation of all possible positions based upon criteria inputted by its developers. It could not improve beyond that level or learn from experience, nor did it understand the intent of each play or even that it was engaged in a game. However, in this thought-provoking, clearly written book, journalist and filmmaker Dormehl (The Apple Revolution) describes how new programming techniques, such as the use of "evolutionary algorithms," allow a computer to develop its own strategies, improve through practice, come up with original ideas, and even find surprising solutions to unusual problems--that is, to become creative. The author also highlights some of the risks involved in our reliance on these machines, incorporating pertinent examples, including the stock market crash that was caused by machine trading. As we use more and more smart devices, linked through the Internet, these dangers are multiplied. Indeed, many people now worry about the singularity, or the point at which computers can design even smarter computers, which may attain self-awareness and go beyond our ability to control them. VERDICT For anyone interested in developments in the field of artificial intelligence, and a worthwhile acquisition for most libraries.--Harold D. Shane, Mathematics Emeritus, Baruch Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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