October 27
- Pamela McCorduck (2004). Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. A K Peters.
- A well-written overview. According to Herb Simon the most reliable source on the first couple of decades of AI.
- Herbert A. Simon (1996). The Science of the Artificial. MIT Press.
- A book with an impressive clarity and precision (cited more than 21,000 times (Google Scholar)) from one of the founders of artificial intelligence and Nobelist in economics.
We take a look at two books from one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, namely Marvin Minsky. Truly a treat! A wonderful thinker. Isaac Asimov once said: “The only people I ever met whose intellects surpasses my own were Carl Sagan and Marvin Minsky”. Here you can find a celebration of Marvin Minsky who died last year: PART 1, PART 2, PART 3, PART 4. Here also is an interview with him on Web of Stories.
- Marvin Minsky (1986). The Society of Mind. Simon & Schuster.
- Marvin Minsky (2006). The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. Simon & Schuster.
- All his lectures are available on MIT OpenCourseWare: Video Lectures in 2011 (at the age of 84). A must watch (take the time for it)!
- Norbert Wiener (1950). The Human Use of Human Being: Cybernetics and Society. Da Capo Press.
- Wiener, the founder of the science of cybernetics discusses the implications of cybernetics.
- Patrick Henry Winston (1992). Artificial Intelligence. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
- Minsky was his doctoral advisor. Winston was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997 and has developed the key textbook on AI. The Lectures are available on MIT OpenCourseWare. (Fall 2010) Minsky’s short remark in Lecture 2 (Falling in Love) on AI textbooks (see link under 4, around 1:13:30 into the lecture): “If you want to keep up with AI you should read Patrick’s textbook even though people are starting to use this new one which doesn’t have any AI in it [smile] By who is it by [image]” …[students: Russell and Norvig]. Minsky: “Russell and Norvig9. It is probably pretty good technically but I leafed through it and didn’t have any… Never mind, it is probably better than I think because I am jealous”.
- Kevin Warwick (2012). Artificial Intelligence: The Basics. Routledge.
- A good overview of the basics.
- Rosalind W. Picard (2000). Affective Computing. MIT Press.
- Covers the quest to give computers the ability to recognize, understand, and express emotions.
- David Vernon (2014). Artificial Cognitive Systems: A Primer. MIT Press.
- A look at a new emerging field.
- Keith L. Downing (2015). Intelligence Emerging: Adaptivity and Search in Evolving Neural Systems. MIT Press.
- A systematic exploration of how intelligence emerges.
- José Hernández-Orallo (2016). The Measure of All Minds: Evaluating Natural and Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge University Press.
- A wide-ranging discussion on intelligence with the goal of providing insights into understanding what intelligence is and how it can be recreated.
- Ray Kurzweil (1999). The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Penguin Press.
- A prophetic blueprint for the future by the restless thinking machine of a Kurzweil?
- James Kennedy, Russell C. Eberhart and Yuhui Shi (2001). Swarm Intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.
- A good overview that goes beyond what we would expect from just looking at the title.
- Ethem Alpaydin (2016). Machine Learning. MIT Press.
- An approachable overview of machine learning.
- Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville (2016). Deep Learning. MIT Press.
- Geoffrey Hinton: “This is the definitive textbook on deep learning. Written by major contributors to the field, it is clear, comprehensive, and authoritative. If you want to know where deep learning came from, what it is good for, and where it is going, read this book”. (back cover).
- Dario Floreano and Claudio Mattiussi (2008). Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence: Theories, Methods, and Technologies. MIT Press.
- Rodney Brooks (back cover): “Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence brings together all the things I’ve been interested in for the last twenty-five years, and surprises me by providing a coherent intellectual framework for them all. This book is a treasure trove of history from Darwin to Gibson and Walter, an unambiguous tutorial on how to build a plethora of computational models, and a healthy exploration of the philosophies that have driven wide-ranging research agendas”.
- Nick Bostrom (2014). Superintelligence: Path, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford University Press.
- Elon Musk: “Worth reading…. We need to be super careful with AI” (back cover).
- Kevin Kelly (2016). The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future. Viking.
- Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired has the great intuition of making sense of technology.
- Sherry Turkle (2005). The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. MIT Press.
- Computers are part of our social and psychological lives. A book by Turkle, a leading figure on human-technology interaction.
- Neil Gershenfeld (1999). When Things Start to Think. Henry Holt and Company.
- Gershenfeld, a creative creator and tinkerer: “I will have succeeded if a shoe computer comes to be seen as a great idea and not just a joke, if it becomes natural to recognize that people and things have relative rights that are now routinely infringed, if computers disappear and the world becomes our interface”.