As the subtitle suggests, this book is
a collection of essays by Dennet. All have been published elsewhere
and some (the first half of the book) are not specifically related
to AI (artificial intelligence) as such, but rather generally
describe Dennett's developing epistemology, in some cases from
the late 1970s. Recommended for the serious student of epistemology
and AI.
An entertaining short epistolary novel
tracking the accidental development of the first AI. Also interesting
because the author, a PhD candidate at Carnegie Melon working
on AI, is the son of Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb
and godfather of the Star Wars program. Recommended.
Disappointing musings on the impact of
computer technology on changes in society. The book begins well
with discussion of the idea that each true revolutionary change
in civilization has come with advances in information tehnology
(i.e. spoken language, writing, printing . . .) But Robertson
then takes a detour into a detailed discussion of the impact
of computers on the development of mathematics, following up
with brief, unimaginative essays on other areas of culture. No
new ideas here: this book would have been interesting in, say,
1960, but Robertson really misses the boat on the true impact
that computer technology will have.
This book expresses my own political and
social ideas and values in the context of current events and
issues better than the work of any other writer I've encountered.
Postrel has done a very good job in this book of expressing exactly
why I find the terms "left" and "right" and
"conservative" and "liberal" to be worthless,
empty icons. Instead, she finds the labels "stasist"
and "dynamist" better descriptions of the real divisions
in culture and politics in the current era. If you read only
one book about current events and politics this year, make it
this one. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
dynamist.com: Virginia Postrel's web site devoted to the ideas
developed in this book
Moravec recounts his own personal involvement
in the birth of modern robotics in the 1960s, through the state
of current research , to the informed speculation on the development
of real, independent artificial intelligence of super-human capability
in the first quarter of the 21st century for which he is well
known. Recommended.
Very well thought-out depiction of a far-future
world in which humanity has branched into a myriad of forms,
from unaltered natural "statics" to wildly engineered
biological creatures, very advanced cyborgs and the main characters
of the book, pure uploads of essentially infinite variety. Chock
full of ideas about the nature of identity and fundamental physics
(!), this is "hard science fiction" at its very best.
Highly Recommended.
In these two books (1990 and 1998) Bear
tells mid-21st century tales of a genetically-altered cop in
Los Angeles and Seattle, dealing with legal and moral issues
raised by artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and genetic
engineering. Very well written and engaging in the depth to which
Bear explores the ideas behind his ideas. Recommended.
Judge Posner collects here his three Clarendon
Law Lectures at Oxford University. He contrasts the jurisprudential
philosophy, substantive law and economic legal culture of the
U.K. and the U.S. Among other things, he makes the surprising
conlcusion that the current U.K. legal system is closer to the
Continental system than it is to the U.S. and shows that simple
reforms in which one system might seek to adopt isolated practices
from the other would be unwise. Recommended to the serious student
of comparative legal theory and practice.
Shermer, one of the founders of Skeptic
magazine, collects here a number of articles originally published
there. Unfortunately not well edited as a complete book, this
work nevertheless belongs on the shelf of every good skeptic.
This volume won Bailyn the Pulitzer Prize
for history. Bailyn here expands his exhaustive technical scholarship
on the pamphlet literature of the American Revolution to a wider
discussion of the currents of thought in which the Founders conceived
the republic. Recommended to the serious student of Anglo-Amercian
Enlightenment political theory and practice.
Very well-written (and often humorous)
adventure and "hard" science fiction story exploring
cryonics, genetic enginneering, nanotechnology and space development.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Halperin's first novel, set in the same
science-fiction future history of the next 50 years as The
First Immortal. Halperin explores the ramifications of development
of a very relaiable "lie detector". Recommended (despite
Halperin's "docu-drama" style, of which I am not fond).
Richard Dawkins blurbed this book like
this: "If my The Selfish Gene were to have a Volume
Two devoted to humans, The Origins of Virtue is pretty
much what I think it ought to look like." This book melds
Dawkins' basic thesis with the insights derived in the last two
decades from thinking about the iterated prisoners' dilemma
to sketch a "natural history" of human morals. Recommended.
Summer Science Fiction: The Reality
Dysfunction, Parts I (Emergence)
and II (Expansion);
The Neutronium Alchemist, Parts I (Consolidation)
and II (Conflict),
Peter F. Hamilton
My friend Bill Luker recommended the first
in this series and I got hooked. Now I'm waiting for the fifth
(and hopefully last) volume, The Sleeping God, due out
later in 1998. Bill described this series as "Episcopalian
Science Fiction". I call it Space (Soap) Opera. Hamilton
does an interesting job of exploring some implications of nanotechnology
and advanced genetic engineering in a classic hard-SF galactic-scale
war epic. But be warned: The major plot element will likely bother
philosophical materialists (it bothers me) and the series gets
a little repetitious after more than 2,000 (!) pages. But Hamilton's
good descriptions of space battles made the effort worth it for
me on lazy summer afternoons.
A very readable account of one of the
great expeditions of discovery and adventure of all time, and
its origins and aftermath. Ambrose puts Lewis and Jefferson and
their great project of discovery into the context of the Enlightenment,
a theme I find to be very appropriate in light of my recent thinking
and reading. Highly recommended.
A book about the values of openness and
secrecy in a world that will be transformed by new information
technologies such as the net and micro-surveillance technologies.
Brin stakes out a position in distinction to the advocates of
thoroughgoing privacy who have been perhaps the most vocal element
of the cyberspace community. I found much with which to agree
in Brin's identification of openness as a key secondary value
in support of a free society and agree that his position is not
as radical as it has been characterized to be by some who have
criticized the book. I disagree with any position Brin might
be taking (it's actually had to tell, in the end) in opposition
to such cryptographic tools as pubic key encryption. The book
is a necessary counterpoint in an on-going dialogue. Highly recommended.
Well-researched "saga" of a
family who reaches from our time into an utterly different 21st
century through cryonics. Halperin does a very good job of depicting
the step-by-step transformation of the world through the technologies
that we now see in their infancies, such as advanced information
processing, nanotechnology and cryonics. I did not find Halperin's
view of the political element of these changes particularly convincing,
but do recommend the book as a solidly reasonable conception
of the next 100 years and beyond. Recommended.
Long historical "novel" of interlocking
stories tracing the history of London from pre-Roman times through
the present day. A sugar-coated way to skim a lot of history,
but not particularly great fiction.
A tour de force overview of the current
state of the art in cognitive science, this book lives up to
its title. Weaving insights from information theory and evolutionary
psychology, Pinker demonstrates just how far we've come in the
last 25 years in understanding how the human mind as a collection
of naturally evolved information processing organs gives rise
to the mental life of humanity and its rich repertoire of behavior.
Highly recommended.
The second in Brin's series of "Uplift"
novels (I read the first, Sundiver, many years ago). These
books deal with, among other things, humanity's relationship
with genetically-enhanced ("uplifted") species of chimpanzees
and dolphins, who have been endowed with higher intelligence
and the ability to function as equals or near-equals in human
society. Interesting exposition of the moral issues raised by
this scenario. Recommended.
Sagan's last work, this book is a collection
of more or less connected musings on the virtues of skepticism
and critical thinking and the alarming prevalance of pseudoscience
and general ignorance and hogwash in the world. Although this
book could have been better edited (some of it is repetitious
and some parts don't hang together well), I recommend it for
the many gems of good prose it contains. Sagan clearly left this
as his testament, and anyone committed to the cause of science
and critical thinking should read it.
Unrugged Individualism: The Selfish
Basis of Benevolence, David Kelley
In this small book, Kelley makes a compelling
case that benevolence is a rational corollary of egoist morality.
Kelley writes from the heart of "orthodox" Randian
objectivism, but his work should be of interest to a broader
audience than it will likely reach.
