Machinery of the Mind: Inside the New Science of Artificial Intelligence

by George Johnson

Discusses current research into artificial intelligence, computer programming, the contributions of Alan Turing, expert systems, Boolean logic, memory structure, and the roots of intelligence

Paperback

First published September 12, 1986

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

George Johnson (born January 20, 1952) is an American journalist and science writer. He is the author of a number of books, including The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (2008) and Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics (1999), and writes for a number of publications, including The New York Times.

He is one of the co-hosts (with science writer John Horgan) of "Science Saturday", a weekly discussion on the website Bloggingheads.tv, related to topics in science. Several prominent scientists, philosophers, and bloggers have been interviewed for the site.

Reviews

[William Crosby]

Although this is an "old" book, it has a good discussion of the fundamentals and issues of AI.

It is also interesting to read about stuff that some people said couldn't be done, but is now being done (such as language translation--although that is not always correct--and search engines which can connect facts from disparate sources).

[Mad Russian the Traveller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in the early to mid 1980's, this book is an account of the state of Artificial Intelligence development at the time, and is an exploration at the layman level of the ideas behind this dream. Because of my training in my profession and my time spent as a computer hobbyist, I find the early chapters a bit redundant. For example, many of the companies mentioned doing research in AI don't even exist anymore and the descriptions of computer hardware are ancient history. But this book is still of value to someone who has not delved into the intricacies of information and control theory. I had not realized the connection between the work of Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener and AI.

This book also antedates object oriented programming, but I can see from the author's description of Lisp programming how this particular language could be considered an ancestor of O.O.P.

The remaining chapters describe the conceptual aspects of AI and many of the implications, even (very briefly) touching upon philosophy. This book gets its high rating because of the excellent way in which the author describes what AI is and some of the history of the emergence of this science. Recommended if you are interested in computer science or thinking about thinking.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Outdated but still interesting as a history of AI and looking at some of the philosophical underpinnings.