Machines Who Think

A 25-year-old book about science has some explaining to do. Machines Who Think was conceived as a history of artificial intelligence, beginning with the first dreams of the classical Greek poets (and the nightmares of the Hebrew prophets), up through its realization as twentieth-century science. The interviews with AI's pioneer scientists took place when the field was young and generally unknown. They were nearly all in robust middle age, with a few decades of fertile research behind them, and luckily, more to come. Thus their explanations of what they thought they were doing were spontaneous, provisional, and often full of glorious fun.