Name: The Age of Intelligent Machines
ISBN: 9780262111218

The Age of Intelligent Machines

What is artificial intelligence? At its essence, it is another way of answering a central question that has been debated by scientists, philosophers, and theologians for thousands of How does the human brain - three pounds of ordinary matter - give rise to thought? With this question in mind, inventor and visionary computer scientist Raymond Kurzweil probes the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence, from its earliest philosophical and mathematical roots through today's moving frontier, to tantalizing glimpses of 21st-century machines with superior intelligence and truly prodigious speed and memory. Lavishly illustrated and easily accessible to the nonspecialist, "The Age of Intelligent Machines provides the background needed for a full understanding of the enormous scientific potential represented by intelligent machines and of their equally profound philosophic, economic, and social implications. It examines the history of efforts to understand human intelligence and to emulate it by building devices that seem to act with human capabilities. Running alongside Kurzweil's historical and scientific narrative, are 23 articles examining contemporary issues in artificial intelligence by such luminaries as Daniel Dennett, Sherry Turkle, Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert, Edward Feigenbaum, Allen Newell, and George Gilder.

What Hacker News says

zackhamApr 2023

Ray Kurzweil has laid out a view on the future that has always been interesting and is feeling increasingly relevant. Incredibly, his prediction for AGI in 2029 seems... conservative? It's too bad this article refers to him as a "former Google engineer" and only bothers to cite a Youtuber talking about his books. He's a fascinating character, has been a prescient futurist for many decades, and his books are very readable - check them out! His big 3 are The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and The Singularity is Near. The last one is the most recent and popular, and is what I'd point people towards.

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max_Dec 2021

1. Incerto by Nassim Taleb

This is the first book that gave me a thorough insight into philosophy. Completely changed my worldview. I reread chapters from it everyday. It has become my bible. The Incerto strictly focuses on the practical applications of stoic philosophy.

2. All books by Dan Brown

The Dan Brown books got me in to reading for fun. While some people may regard his books as thrillers, I consider them hard science fiction. I owe him my reading culture.

3. The age of intelligent machines. 4. The singularity is near. 5. The age of spiritual machines. ... all the above by Raymond Kurzweil

These books introduced me to computer science.

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test6554Mar 2017

"The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" by Marc Levinson

This book is an amazing breakdown of the shipping container and the impact that seemingly insignificant details can have on the world. But more importantly for me were the examples of non-automated labor required to move cargo in the past. It demonstrated the sheer amount of human effort that is poured into profitable tasks. It made me consider some of the tasks/projects I decided never to bother with out of laziness and think about what it would take in terms of tools and resources/manpower to actually get those tasks done. Instead of thinking about whether I wanted to do some task, I began thinking about whether the outcome was desirable regardless of the work required, and if it was, I thought about what it would take to get it done. If I had to list a second book it woul be "The Age of Intelligent Machines" by Kurzweil

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mixmaxFeb 2008

I read Kurzweil's book "the age of intelligent machines" where he set quite a few predictions for the next 10-15 years. This was 15 years ago - and he got almost all of them right.

I just don't want to dismiss him - besides it seems arrogant that we should forever be the best evolution can offer.

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SavantIdiotJan 2022

Using Feynman to throw shade at Minsky. Nice.

I read "Age of Intelligent Machines" by Kurzweil in 1990 and so far he's the only one that thinks human-like AI won't be until the 2100's, but he also has a more holistic view of intelligence (e.g., comparing evolution as an intelligent process with an IQ <1 to a dragonfly).

I'm still waiting for detection network (Yolo/MNSSN) that can actually work on non-canonical images.

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mindcrimeMar 2020

OK, here ya go. This list is, for now, just a raw dump of titles and authors. When I have some more time, I'll turn this into a proper blog post with more commentary, sorting / grouping of the titles, links to complementary resources etc.

One bit of warning... the first half of this list includes everything "AI" related I've read (or am currently reading) for about the past two years. I say "AI" and not "AGI" because I haven't always bothered to make the distinction. So some of this stuff may not be relevant to you.

FYI, this list (especially the first half) is a heterogeneous lot that varies considerably along the "pop sci" to "academic" axis, as well as the "applied" to "theoretical" axis.

I'm also leaving off (for now anyway) most the "related, but not specifically about AI" stuff, like books on Probability, Bayesian Statistics, Graph Theory, etc., and books that are more about contemporary "Machine Learning" and "Deep Learning" topics. I do believe that there is a connection though, and that DL may play a role in building a truly intelligent system, so when I write the expanded blog post, I'll include more of that stuff.

OK, With no further ado, the "AI stuff I've read recently" list.

0. Blackboard Systems - Robert Engelmore & Tony Morgan

1. The Age of Spiritual Machines - Ray Kurzweil

2. The Emotion Machine - Marvin Minsky

3. The Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky

4. Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI - John Brockman (ed)

5. AI Super-Powers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order - Kai-Fu Lee (more meta than actually about AI per-se)

6. Artificial Intelligence In Practice - Bernard Marr

7. Architects of Intelligence - Martin Ford

8. Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter

9. Superintelligence - Nick Bostrom

10. The Master Algorithm - Pedro Domingos

11. On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkins

12. Unified Theories of Cognition - Alan Newell

13. The AGI Revolution - Ben Goertzel

14. How To Create A Mind - Ray Kurzweil

15. Case-Based Reasoning: A Textbook - Michael M. Richter & Rosina O. Weber

16. The Age of Intelligent Machines - Ray Kurzweil

17. The Singularity is Near - Ray Kurzweil

18. An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems - Michael J. Wooldridge

19. Engineering General Intelligence - Volume 1 - Ben Goertzel

20. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach - Peter Norvig & Stuart Russell

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Below here is the stuff that is in the "to read" queue. This part tends to run more to textbooks and more academic material and less of the "pop sci" stuff. The choices on this list were inspired by other reading and research I've done, which led me to believe this group of titles includes material that will be useful. YMMV.

21. Cause Effect Pairs in Machine Learning - Isabelle Guyon, Alexander Statnikov, & Berna Bakir Batu (eds)

22. Propositional, Probabilistic, and Evidential Reasoning: Integrating Numerical and Symbolic Approaches - Weiru Liu

23. Human Compatible - Stuart Russell

23. Rebooting AI - Gary Marcus & Ernest Davis

24. Artificial Intelligence - Melanie Mitchell

25. Protocol Analysis - K. Anders Ericsson & Herbert A. Simon

26. The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence - Zenon W. Pylyshyn

27. Image and Mind - Stephen Michael Kosslyn

28. Elements of Episodic Memory - Endel Tulving

29. Things and Places: How The Mind Connects With The World - Zenon W. Pylyshyn

30. Information Algebras: Generic Structures for Inference - Jurg Kohlas

31. Probabilistic Logics and Probabilistic Networks - Rolf Haenni, Jan-Willem Romeijn, Gregory Wheeler & Jon Williamson

32. Knowledge-Based Systems in Artificial Intelligence - Randall Davis & Douglas B. Lenat

33. Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems - Douglas B. Lenat & R.V. Guha

34. Elements of Information Theory - Thomas M. Cover & Joy A. Thomas

35. The Bayesian Choice - Christian P. Robert

35. Machine Learning for Commonsense Reasoning Processes - Xenia Naidenova

36. Reinforcement Learning and Optimal Control - Dimitri P. Bertsekas

37. An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications - Ming Li & Paul Vitanyi

38. The Mechanical Mind: A Philosophical Introduction to Minds, Machines, and Mental Representation - Tim Crane

39. Constraining Cognitive Theories - Zenon W. Pylyshyn

40. Neuro-Dynamic Programming - Dimitri P. Bertsekas & John Tsitsiklis

41. The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker

42. How The Mind Works - Steven Pinker

43. Images and Words - Steven Pinker

44. Words and Rules - Steven Pinker

45. The Blank Slate - Steven Pinker

46. Consciousness Explained - Daniel Dennett

47. How to Build a Brain: A Neural Architecture for Biological Cognition - Chris Eliasmith

48. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence - Eugene Charniak & Drew McDermott

49. Metamagical Themas - Douglas Hofstadter

50. I Am A Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter

51. Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies: Computer Models Of The Fundamental Mechanisms Of Thought - Douglas Hofstadter

52. Principles of Synthetic Intelligence - Joshua Bach

53. Anatomy of the Mind - Ron Sun

54. Generic Inference: A Unifying Theory for Automated Reasoning - Marc Pouly & Jurg Kohlas

55. Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, and the Design of Intelligent Agents: The Answer-Set Programming Approach - Michael Gelfond & Yulia Kahl

56. Semantic Networks: An Evidential Formalization and its Connectionist Realization - Lockendra Shastri

57. Automated Planning and Acting - Malik Ghallab, Dana Nau, & Paolo Traverso

58. How Can The Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe? - John Anderson

59. Spiking Neuron Models - Wulfram Gerstner & Werner Kistler

60. Neural Engineering - Chris Eliasmith & Charles H. Anderson

61. Principles of Neural Design - Peter Sterling & Simon Laughlin

62. Semantic Information Processing - Marvin Minsky

63. The SOAR Cognitive Architecture - John Laird

64. The Architecture of Cognition - John Anderson

65. Human Associative Memory - John Anderson & Gordon E. Bower

66. Knowledge Representation & Reasoning - Ronald J. Brachman & Hector J. Levesque

67. Cognitive Architectures - Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira, Joao Silva Sequeira, & Rodrigo Ventura (eds)

68. Scripts, Goals, and Planning - Roger C. Schank & Robert P. Abelson

69. Reasoning About Plans - James F. Allen, Henry A. Kautz, Richard N. Pelavin, & Josh D. Tenenberg

70. Generating Abstraction Hierarchies: An Automated Approach to Reducing Search in Planning - Craig A. Knoblock

71. Representations of Commonsense Knowledge - Ernest Davis

72. Approaches to Knowledge Representation - G.A. Ringland & D.A. Duce

73. Knowledge Representation - John F. Sowa

74. Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine - John F. Sowa

75. Inside Computer Understanding - Roger C. Schank & Christopher K. Riesbeck

76. Integrating Rules and Connectionism for Robust Commonsense Reasoning - Ron Sun

77. Probabilistic Logic Networks - Ben Goertzel, et al.

78. The Subtlety of Sameness: A Theory and Computer Model of Analogy Making - Robert M. French

79. Analogy Making as Perception - Melanie Mitchell

80. Real World Reasoning - Ben Goertzel, et al.

81. Artificial General Intelligence - Ben Goertzel & Cassio Pennachin

82. The Hidden Pattern: A Patternist Philosophy of Mind - Ben Goertzel

83. Engineering General Intelligence - Volume 2 - Ben Goertzel, Cassio Pennachin, & Nil Geisweiller

84. Computation and Cognition - Zenon W. Pylyshyn

85. Universal Artificial Intelligence - Marcus Hutter

86. The Cambridge Handbook of Computational Psychology - Ron Sun

87. Handbook of Neuroevolution Through Erlang - Gene I. Sher

88. Readings in Cognitive Science: A Perspective from Psychology and Artificial Intelligence - Allan Collins & Edward E. Smith -- this one contains a LOT of seminal papers in the field, including one of the earliest papers on Semantic Networks by Ross Quillian. I actually put this on the wrong part of the list, as I'm about halfway through reading this one, but just remembered it and didn't want to renumber everything. Heh.

Eh, that's a pretty good chunk of the stuff I've got lying around here, waiting to be read. There's a handful of others, but my fingers are getting numb.

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