AI: An Altogether Different Animal

David Eagleman is one of those rare writers who's as likable in person as he is in his books. His 20-year career as a neuroscientist has been unusual; my personal introduction to his work was his 2010 book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, which combined the bite-sized brilliance of Calvino's Invisible Cities with the wry pathos of Borges. Eagleman was recently the writer and presenter of The Brain, a six-part PBS television series that beautifully illuminates "the most complex object we've discovered in the universe." Eagleman holds joint appointments in the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Along with Sum, his books include The Brain: The Story of You (2015) and Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (2012).