Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence: Pamela McCorduck: 9781568812052: Amazon.com: Books

The review you are reading was written by a human, not a machine. This fact would no doubt disappoint some of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, who would have thought that by the 21st century a computer would be able to read a book, consider it in the context of other knowledge and express some thoughtful opinions about it. On the other hand, the human who wrote this review was aided in researching and preparing it by telecommunications and computer networks, including the Internet, that owe a big part of their existence and even more of their smooth functioning to theories and concepts that arose from artificial-intelligence research. The enormous, if stealthy, influence of AI bears out many of the wonders foretold 25 years ago in Machines Who Think, Pamela McCorduck s groundbreaking survey of the history and prospects of the field. A novelist at the time (she has since gone on to write and consult widely on the intellectual impact of computing), McCorduck got to the founders of the field while they were still feeling their way into a new science.