A Science Journalist's Journey to Understand AI

As a teenager, I discovered a worn copy of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter on a bookshelf at home. It still had a computer punch card in it that my Mom had used as a bookmark, back when she briefly worked as a programmer in the early 1980s. Reading that book was like falling into another world. I found myself thinking about the mind and computers in brand new ways. I learned about Alan Turing's work for the first time.