AI – Its Nature and Future

As Prof Jack Copeland says on the back cover, this book really provides everything you need to know about artificial intelligence, both in terms of its history, current developments and prospects for the future. The story goes back to the 1950s with Turing and Cybernetics and the emergence of distinctive fields modelling language and logical thinking on the one hand and purposive/adaptive motor behaviour on the other. The holy grail of the field is general intelligence and there has been spectacular progress on a number of fronts. There are chapters on language, creativity and emotion, artificial neural networks, and robots and artificial life. This leads to a careful discussion of the sense in which artificial intelligence is intelligence as we generally understand it. The author is a reliable and balanced guide through discussions of machine and phenomenal consciousness and even the question of whether machines might be moral in any meaningful sense. She takes a sceptical view, along with phenomenologists, of the prospects for a singularity and a machine-controlled world. It was reassuring to learn about the development of 'Friendly AI' that is not underpinned by a left hemisphere logic of manipulation. In any event, the informed discussion to be found in this book gives serious pause for thought.