Thinking Machines: The inside story of Artificial Intelligence and our race to build the future

Description

Tech billionaires, reclusive scientists, dancing vacuum cleaners, voices beyond the grave - how a dream from the 1950s became our modern, super-networked world. 2016 marks the 60-year anniversary of the phrase 'Artificial Intelligence' and in this fascinating book, Luke Dormehl charts the weird and wonderful journey of one of mankind's greatest projects, the creation of Thinking Machines. This is a story of how what it means to be human in the face of accelerating machine intelligence. It's about trying to make computers that are smarter than we are, and what happens when it goes wrong. About what creativity means when all knowledge is data that can be stored on microchips. Or about what happens when machines can learn from their mistakes much faster than humans can. And above all, it's about the dazzling future around the corner, how our lives might just change forever, and whether you and I aren't just thinking machines of a sort as well.

Luke Dormehl is a British technology writer and public speaker and author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula- How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems... And Create More. He has written for Wired, The Guardian, Fast Company, The Sunday Times and others, as well as directing a range of documentaries for UK television.

A gifted storyteller who interweaves the personal stories with the broad history of artificial intelligence -- Ray Kurzweil * New York Times * AI is about to change our world profoundly. This book tells you everything you need to know. * Leander Kahney, author of Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products * If you're interested in learning more about our robotic soon-to-be overlords, your best bet is THINKING MACHINES * The Spectator * makes a convincing, often disturbing, but always-entertaining case that that we're in for a wild ride. * Kirkus Reviews *